A rollicking look through the history and foundations of civil disobedience, Jewel tells us why there is no choice but to be involved. Your conscience demands it.
TRANSCRIPT:
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Right. Civil disobedience.
This is a famous photo. A lot of people use it. I was adopted. That was taken, uh, somewhere near the end of the war, about 1945 or something. And Germany, I think he probably came to Australia and I think it might be my dad because I've inherited those tendencies. No doubt. No doubt indeed.
So, civil disobedience not necessarily going along with what the establishment would like you to do. There are reasons for that, that a lot of people object to doing that. Western civilization, the system that we live in.
There is a history of talking about civil disobedience, considering the concept right back to Cicero, a Roman cons statesman, lawyer, philosopher, very, very well read, um, very, um, well documented. He came up with the concept of obeying laws that were not just to quote him. He says, people shouldn't blindly follow laws and should rebel against them if they go against morals or the law of nature.
That concept is just fundamental for human rights, is it not? And that's right back there before Christ, the century, before Christ was born. He was saying things like that in Rome.
For those who are religious, St. Thomas Aquinas has had many, many rights. Those who know about St. Thomas Aquinas would realize that he's very supportive. He was very supportive of sticking with the law. Just obey the law 'cause he said, if the law is there, God let it be there. So just leave it alone. Just it's God's will. So do it. But he qualified that by saying things like, unjust laws did not bind the citizen in conscience.
There's the concept of conscience. If your conscience can't handle what is happening with the law, there is a question mark that you should consider. Then we have some centuries later in the, uh, 17th and into the 18th century, John Locke, he was quoted widely.
He was read widely by the people who ended up doing the American, um, revolution, the, uh, independence Revolution. He says that one of the purposes of the government was the protection of the natural rights of the people.
Now define natural rights. That's human rights. And, and what a human can expect is it should not be violated by governments. And of course, he was the inspiration for many people in the American Revolution.
They were inspired to rebel against the unjust laws that were imposed on them by the British system in the American colonies. And then, of course, the one that we will refer to quite often this evening, Henry David Thoreau, he said that the authority of the government depends on the consent of the government. You can't govern us unless we consent to you governing us.
Justice is superior to the laws and enacted by the government. There's got to be justice there. It can't be law for law's sake. There must be justice. And then of course, he himself got in trouble, but he, uh, wrote an essay called On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, which he did after he was in trouble with, um, not, um, paying some taxes. Uh, those particular taxes were, um, about the Mexican American war. Um, and anyway, he didn't really have a lot of publicity with that particular essay while he was alive, but it just grew in, um, fame. And then it was all over the world. It was quoted, and we will refer to a couple of other people with civil rights, who used his writings extensively, the concept of this essay on the duty of civil disobedience.
He said that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or a trophy that is diminished their consciences. Here comes that word again, conscience. And that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice.
Think about those words. You have a duty to not let the government make you an agent of injustice. Think Nuremberg. Okay? The Nuremberg Defense, it's been ruled. It is not a defense.
Your conscience should take precedence. Now, I realize in war, you are really talking about putting your life on the line, particularly if you are in the military and that's what happened in Nuremberg.
And then there's, there's all sorts of, um, of, uh, opinions about that. But keep that in mind that your conscience must prevail with whatever you do. He says, you've got a duty to disobey the law and accept the consequences of the disobedience. But nonviolently, so just don't do what they say. But there's no need to retaliate. There's no need to cause trouble. We are not Black Lives Matter. We're not Antifa. We are not Extinction Rebellion. We're grownups. Okay?
Now, civil disobedience, the concept itself, there are two usual definitions and they, and they very often get mixed up civil as he referred to them.
As Thoro said, it means relating to citizens and their interrelations with one another or with the state. Therefore, it means disobedience to the state. And it's not necessarily peaceful, as I said, BLM, Antifa, et cetera.
But the other meaning of civil is observe accepted social form, be polite. And that is the usual way that people try to implement civil disobedience. It follows that that obedience would be nonviolent. And the, there have been many successful agents of change employing this method of civil disobedience throughout history.
And we'll have a look at a few of them. The civil disobedience itself, the concept, if it's going to be successful, it's about a refusal to obey laws that are immoral or unjust. And it appeals to one sense of justice or conscience. You could say. It puts the issue on the public agenda. That's the important thing. If you wanna make change, it's got to get there on the public agenda.
So it's no good doing it in your living room and talking to the wall. You've got to get some sort of publicity for it. And it will draw attention to unjust laws. Disobedience must be open, public and non-violent. If there's gonna be any violence, now, you don't wanna be the recipient of it, but it will, it will happen.
Let them do it. Melbourne being a moot point, the behavior of the authorities down there is simply outrageous, and they are on show to the world. But I've been very pleased with the response from the people in Melbourne who almost always are very peaceful and they don't retaliate.
They're being very mature down there. I dunno how they did it all that time. They've been locked down. So I take my hat off to them. Now, the famous proponent of civil di disobedience, Gandhi.
Gandhi came up with a concept in the Transvaal originally and in India of Satyagraha, which is simply civil disobedience. But there is, it has a certain twist. It is most definitely must not ever resort to violence. Never.
He said it aims to eliminate antagonisms that's between the state and people without harming the antagonists themselves as opposed to violent resistance. The ends and the means are inseparable, essentially. He said, you've gotta work with these people. You've gotta win, but you've gotta work with them. So if it has been really violent and hostile, it's never going to work. You've, you've just got to be persevere.
And we all know the story of Gandhi and how he finally got independence for India, or was part of getting that independence for India. The famous Salt March of 1930, if you're not aware of the details of salt, March salt is essential to the diet, the Indian diet.
They have a lot of it. And it is of course, abundantly available because it is surrounded by the sea. The British took over the production of salt. They produced, they took over the places where salt was being produced.
They, uh, manufactured it, and I think often they even took it to England and manufactured it, sent it back and charged exorbitant prices to the Indians. And on top of which, when they sent it back, they imposed, um, uh, taxes, oh, that as well. So they absolutely screwed them left, right and centre.
And this is a staple of the Indian diet. And this was the thing that Gandhi said, we will take a stand on salt. So he started a march with about 78 people.
They marched 240 miles over 24 days. So that's 10 miles a day. It's about 388 kilometers about here to about Bundaberg. And over 24 days and all the way he, um, he spoke at various towns on the way. By the time he got to the sea, over 50,000 people were with him. But just before they got to the sea, the British knowing where they were heading, went and destroyed the salt flats.
So they couldn't get anything. So they got there and it was all destroyed and all plowed up in the salt flats. But he walked around and he found a tiny little lump of salt that hadn't been, uh, simply plowed in. And he, he picked up that piece of salt and he said, we haven't got it.
And they took plot, lots of photos of that. That was the start of the Indians with salt marches all up and down the coast. And it went on for years and years, and it took them years to get justice with that.
But that was the beginning of the resistance of the Indians against the British rule. Of course, he'd been doing many things with the legal system and advocating, et cetera, all the way. But that was the thing that got the publicity.
It was public. He got people on side and it was nonviolent. And the behavior of the British in retaliation was widely condemned all over the world. So it was successful civil disobedience, par excellence. That was Gandhi.
Now America, in Montgomery, in Alabama, every bus had metal signs on the front and the back. It said colored go to the back of the bus. Colored people were not allowed in the front of the bus, inside the bus there were signs and there was a sign on a stand that would be put up at the front of where the colored were allowed.
And if they move, they wanted more room for the white people, they would move this sign back if they, uh, had more white people getting on the bus. So it just changed the goalposts depending on how many people were on the bus. And the way it was done was simply appalling. Then along came a little lady Rosa Parks, a quiet, diminutive little church going lady. And one day she just said, no, I'm not moving and she got arrested.
Now, there had been people before who had said that they had been arrested. Almost always, they were young. They were, they reacted, uh, rather violently. And they just got thrown in jail. And they would just seem to be, you know, hysterical teenagers or whatever. Here was a lady who was a pillar of society. You could not fault her. She was the obvious person to be the poster child for resisting this ridiculous situation.
So Rosa Parks got on this bus and she ended up getting arrested. And this is how it happened. Oh, by the way, when she was arrested, she said, the more we gave in, the more we to these ridiculous rules, compare that to today's situation.
Two weeks to flatten the curve, and where are we now? Okay? And, and the more oppressive it became, and it will become more oppressive, uh, what's happening with that camp out? It's, uh, Toowoomba, who's going there according to Anna the other day, people like me, right?
What happened on that bus, right? This looks a lot more complicated than it really is. See that red line, this particular bus that was the, uh, the white part was to the right and the driver is, uh, over to the right on the front. And the rest of the bus was for where the coloreds could go, a bigger section, because there were more coloreds taking the bus. What would happen under normal circumstances?
See the green triangle, that was the front door. Everybody went in the front door, paid the driver, the blacks would have to go out again, walk to the back and go in the red door. They were not allowed to walk past those half a dozen seats of the white people in case they contaminated them, and they would go to the back. Okay, nice.
When the, the bus was going along. See that number one with the circle around it? That's where Rosa Parks was sat. Those number twos alongside her, right across, they were other black people sat in those chairs there. And then something happened, the driver got up and moved the sign back and moved it back one row.
So the seats that Rosa and those people were in were now designated in the white section. And he told them all to move. She moved, but she moved over to the window and she was not going back any further. The other people all moved. He, instead of throwing her off the bus, as he had done before this particular driver, and she had had an altercation many years before, um, he decided to get her arrested.
And that was the start of the revolution. That one simple gesture of that lady, she was ordered to move to the back of the bus. She simply said, no. And that ladies and gentlemen, is how it is done. No, very quietly. As a result of that, the Montgomery bus boycott started with her court case, et cetera. It lasted 385 days.
Not one single black person in that town, a rather large town of Montgomery, took a bus for 385 days. Look at the caravans of them walking to work, cycling to work, carpooling, anything but going on the bus. And they broke the bus company. They broke the will of the legislators, eventually there through the, uh, Supreme Court of Alabama. They changed the law, but said, you cannot discriminate on a person's skin color to get on the bus.
So they won after 385 days at the head of that Montgomery bus boycott. And, uh, leading it all the way was Martin Luther King. That was the start of his civil action.
And of course, he had an entire career of it until he, of course, he was assassinated for. Martin Luther King Jr. sort of cut his teeth on that Montgomery bus boycott. Now he, of course you all know his story. He's a Nobel Prize winner for peace, et cetera. He's a very famous man.
Another very famous thing about him was a letter he wrote when he was in Birmingham jail. And he wrote it to other clergymen, white clergymen who were lambasting him for going against the rules and not bending down and just being a troublemaker. And he wrote a very long, an absolutely superb letter called the Letter from the Birmingham Jail, which is still a famous letter in this day and age.
Part of what he said in that was, one has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
It was that simple. And that's what he did. And he always said, non-violence, always. And he also said, any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail in order to arouse the conscience of the community. Monica Smit, right?
Aroused the conscience of the community, um, aroused conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law. So he played the game really well, but he made sure he got publicity. That is a key.
If you are against what is happening with a law, okay, get some publicity. Just going back to looking at people with a lot of wisdom from times past. This is my favorite statesman from all the history of, of politics, Edmund Burke.
There's one very famous quote that I'll refer to later, but he has said a, a number of very wise things, which could be applied to this day and age. This, by the way, he was writing these things at the time when Captain Cook was coming here, when the first fleet was coming here.
When the American Revolution before that happened, all of that was happening at the time. This man was a statesman in the British parliament, an Irish, um, statesman. He says, the people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion, what are we looking at here?
A delusion about, uh, why are we doing this? Okay, there are a lot of opinions. Our very good friend Robert, our doctor friend Robert, will have a lot to say about that I'm sure, later on.
The true danger then is when liberty is nibbled away for expedience and by parts bit by bit by bit. Just one more thing after another. This is what they do.
And if you conform, they'll simply take more. If it's wrong in the first place, it's wrong in the end place, no passion. So affectionately robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear seen mainstream media lately, fear porn.
They've all gotta go back to statistics 101 because their interpretation is so biased. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason and justice tell me I ought to do, ought to do, duty to do. See, there's concepts, there's fundamental concepts over the ages. They remain the same.
And this is the biggie that everybody knows, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Can you imagine where we would be today if a lot of people had just gone along with everything? And I know a lot of people agree with it, I know that I respect that, but I would like them to respect my opinion too. Thank you. And my opinion is very well founded, in fact, as is, uh, that of many of my friends.
And he also said nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. I don't do much, but I try and I keep talking to people and this is what we've all got to do, what's within our own capabilities.
Just don't refuse to do it if you think it's the right thing to do. Recently, last weekend, St. Kilda Melbourne picnic on the pavement on one side of the street, you can see down the bottom are all these people sitting under canopies on tables being nice little people on the other side.
People are sat on the ground on picnic rugs, and they're not allowed to go into any premises. So they just sat on the pavement and the police were there, there were dozens of police there to stop any trouble.
There wasn't any trouble at all. The people just said, well, we're not allowed to go into a restaurant, we'll just sit down on the pavement. A very good idea. And they got publicity, I got to hear about it, and I live all the way up here. So there you go.
Just little things like that can be done. If you want to make a point and civilly disobey the, in this case, it's not the law, as we all know. These are just guidelines. These are just edicts of bureaucrats. And then Michael Uni, the famous Michael Leunig, he is an absolute treasure in this Australian society. 50 years he has been working, uh, for the, I think it's The Ages, it, but, uh, I think it's The Australian who threw him. Anyway, somebody threw him out, okay?
This was ages ago, this particular cartoon that he put up. And he's drawing a parallel between that situation in Tiana and Square and this, uh, current, he was having a go at Dan Andrews, and this is what cartoonists do. They exaggerate. Perhaps they, uh, draw a long bow, but you know, that's what they do. They, they draw attention to a situation.
He got sacked after 50 years, and he is probably never going to go back. And I'm sure somebody else will take him up. I mean, he's had a go at everything. And everybody, no matter what the color of your politics, he has a go. But of course, at the moment, you're not allowed to be a journalist or a cartoonist.
We have censorship on steroids at the moment. Now, I'll leave the last word to Thoreau himself. Must the citizen ever for a moment or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience? Then? I think that we should be men first and subjects afterwards and uh, um, we could be men or women. Of course, that was the culture of the time. It's only men who, uh, did things then.
But people first and subjects afterwards. Your conscience must not be violated. If your conscience is based in what is good, what is moral, what is humane, you must obey it.
And so civil disobedience may possibly be an option for people. And there are various ways that you can do that. I'm not here inciting people to hatred or whatever, whatever.
I have heard some people, um, there is a very well known person at the moment who is very sincere, who is ex, um, labor party ex, um, CFMEU, ex Trade Union boss, et cetera, very much entrenched in that system.
He is calling for trade unionists to sabotage the ABC government departments, the houses of particular people. That's, that's, uh, no, that's not acceptable. That's breaking the law. That's sabotage you. Just, that is not nonviolent. It's close to violent action. You just, I don't agree with that kind of approach at all. You've got to be lawful, you've gotta be respectful and let them do the wrong thing.
And let's highlight their retaliatory uh, behaviors.
