I have collected a number of wise sayings from a number of other historical figures that were fulfilling their duties to warn about tyrants and tyranny. Thoreau’s America in the 1840s “only” ruled over the earth and the sea - and not the air. Thoreau lived in a time before there were so many warmongering militarists, so many ChickenHawk politicians, so many war-profiteering corporations and so many billionaire financiers. He was commenting in an era long before there was any inkling of a German Luftwaffe, a British Royal Air Force, a United States Air Force, the American development, testing and deployment of nuclear weapons, guided missile technology, the perpetual war predictions of the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld/Rice/Rove administration, the criminal drone wars of Bush and Obama and the Pentagon’s stated aim of “full-spectrum” global domination of sea, land and space. Of course, Thoreau was living in another, perhaps more innocent time. Noting that the Mexican War represented another act of homicidal violence by America’s military he wrote, “Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.” In a time (the middle of the 19th century) when the US military was committing another criminal act (one that, a century later, would meet the definition of an international war crime and crime against the peace) Thoreau objected to the armed invasion, illegal occupation and bald-faced theft of that part of Mexico north of the Rio Grande River, and he responded by speaking out against it.Īnd, not surprisingly, in a country that has a long habit of silencing, persecuting and imprisoning its most altruistic and peace-loving citizens, he wound up in jail for his resistance. If Thoreau had been writing and living his truth 2000 years earlier, he would probably have been in league with Jesus of Nazareth, who also qualifies as a major advocate and model for living an ethical, fearless life of civil disobedience to the greedy and violent powers-that-be. Thoreau’s writings on the subject of active, nonviolent resistance to authority inspired Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King and innumerable other proponents of non-violent resistance to tyranny, including today’s Occupy Wall Street movement. I recently came upon a quote from Henry David Thoreau, who many regard as the father of nonviolent civil disobedience.
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