The revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.
Interpretation
Revolutions happen when oppressed individuals refuse to comply with their oppressors.
The quote by Karl Hess emphasizes the power of non-cooperation in the face of oppression. When individuals who are wronged or victimized choose to stop supporting or complying with systems that exploit or harm them, it can lead to significant societal change and even revolutionary movements. This highlights the importance of individual agency and solidarity in challenging unjust systems.
In practice
In a speech advocating for social change, one might say, 'As Karl Hess stated, the revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.'
It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.
We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.
They [anarchists] spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be free. After that itβs all choice and chance.
Governments have always tried to crush reform movements, to destroy ideas, to kill the thing that cannot die. Without regard to history, which shows that no Government have ever succeeded in doing this, they go on trying in the old, senseless way.
What could be heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of all forms? And yet some rocks undergo a change in their molecular structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light.
When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives
I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.
It is up to us to change laws on the books like 'Stand Your Ground' laws and push elected officials to enact regulations that hold police officers to the same standards as the rest of society. This is why we vote.
You cannot save wonderful towns. You can only save wonderful towns by building new ones.
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