Rev. Danny Fisher

Today’s quote is from Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s democratically-elected Prime Minister, Nobel Peace laureate, and socially-engaged Buddhist icon who has spent fifteen of the last twenty-two years under house arrest. (She was released from her latest house arrest late last year.) Earlier this year, she was named one of Time Magazine‘s “100 Most Influential People” for 2011. This is it — from the second of her recent Reith Lectures:

During the years I spent under house arrest, the radio, which was my link to the great outside, took me as easily to the far reaches of the globe as to the top of my own street. It was from the radio that I heard about NLD activities in the immediate vicinity of my house, just as it was from the radio that I learned of the breaching of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the moves towards constitutional change in Chile, the progress of democratisation in South Korea, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. The books I received intermittently from my family included the works of Vaclav Havel, the memoirs of Zakharov, biographies of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, the writings of Timothy Garton Ash. Europe, South Africa, South America, Asia – wherever there were peoples calling for justice and freedom, there were our friends and allies.

When I was released from house arrest, I took every opportunity to speak to our people about the courage and sufferings of black South Africans, about living in truth, about the power of the powerless, about the lessons we could learn from those for whom their struggle was their life, as our struggle is our life.

Perhaps because I spoke so often of the East European Movement for Democracy, I began to be described as a “dissident”. Originally Vaclav Havel did not seem to have been enthusiastic about the term “dissident” because it had been imposed by Western journalists on him and others in the human rights movement in Czechoslovakia. He then went on to explain in detail what meaning should be put on dissidents and the dissident movement in the context of what is happening in his country. He held that the basic job of a dissident movement was to serve the truth – that is to serve the real aims of life – and that this endeavour should develop into a defence of the individual and his or her right to a free and truthful life. That is a defence of human rights and a struggle to see the laws respected.

This seemed to describe very satisfactorily what the NLD had been doing over the years and I happily accepted that we were dissidents. The official status of our party as seen by the authorities matter little because our basic job as dissidents remains what it has been over the years, and the objectives of our dissent remains what it has been over the years.