If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He’s not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he’s really needed.
—Vaclav Havel
Be inspired by some of the smartest ideas and voices that have ever stood against authoritarianism.
Books not only inspire, they can show the path of best Resistance.
Reading inspiring books provides mental fuel, energy, and ideas for our actions. A book is the best way I know for finding information, strategies, ideas—if it is true that knowledge is power, then books are weapons. Make no mistake, this is a battle, arm yourself! There is a reason why oppressive regimes have long sought to ban books that criticize tyranny, despotism, and demagoguery.
Books are inherently radical. (In the modern Internet age, they are more radical than ever.) I see them as a natural antidote to the shallow information overload that we constantly swim through these days, thanks to the Internet. Reading a book forces us to slow down. Your mind works differently when you are reading words on paper instead of on a screen. Books are much longer and more in-depth than any clickbait Internet article. Reading a book means taking the time to explore issues, questions, and obstacles fully, so you get a well-rounded picture of the situation, not a bite-sized summary.
Books are strange and fresh, and subversive by nature, because they ask us to imagine worlds and realities that are different from our own; that is inherently subversive, imagination stretching, and therefore reality stretching. To read is to imagine another way, therefore to read is to protest. Read an inspiring book! Here is a list of recommendations to get you started.
Chomsky gives a conversational, sharp, and in-depth analysis of the ten principles of concentration of wealth and power, to show exactly how wealth inequality has shaped democracy throughout history to get us to where we are today. He lays out how the oligarchy has consciously and concertedly pushed back in reaction to the progress of the ’60s to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the people Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind.”
The diary of a young Jewish girl, written in hiding during Hitler’s Nazi occupation of Holland. Beautiful and heartbreaking. Books like this are so important because they take something like the Holocaust, which can seem like an impersonal number, a blurry historic fact, and make it personal. Anne Frank’s diary reminds us that racist fascism hurts real people.
The Czech poet details what it is like as an artist and an intellectual to live within a country that has fallen prey to an oppressive regime. Milosz (who also wrote some very wonderful poetry) describes the different ways that people can lie to themselves in order to accept an authoritarian regime.
You can get a lot of knowledge in a short amount of time with this book; it’s a fast read, lucid and concise. Shows what we can learn from history about how to resist the methods and tactics of fascism. Lays out the many parallels between tyrants of the past century and the current president.
OK, this one isn’t really a book. It’s a free online manifesto that was quickly put together in the days after the 2016 election by some policy wonks who worked in the Obama administration. They point out how effective the Tea Party’s tactics of putting pressure on local politics was, and explain how to use those same tactics against the Trump administration. You can read the whole thing in the time it takes to brew and drink a cup of tea.
(Download the PDF at indivisible.com.)
This graphic novel tells the real-life story of young Marjane growing up in the 1980s and experiencing her homeland of Iran being taken over by an oppressive regime. Entertaining, and beautifully illustrated, it shows what it was like to go from a society with intellectual and cultural freedom to one of oppression.
Zinn demonstrates that in history, time and again, change only happens when people can set aside their differences and stand together against rich people who use politics to make sure they stay rich and in power. For young adults there is also Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States, which is slightly shorter and has the added bonus of showing historical episodes where young people made an impact as activists.
Thoreau argues that we should listen to what our conscience tells us, not what the government legislates. Thoreau refused to pay his taxes to a government that supported slavery. He believed when the law of the land is immoral it is up to the individual to take a stand for what he knows to be right.
Thomas Frank is always provocative and fun to read, I’m a fan. Here Frank asks what went wrong with the Democratic Party. He demonstrates that historically the Democratic Party was the party of the common people, the party fighting for workers and fighting for social justice, and the Democratic Party can only regain its health if it returns to those roots—and becomes the party of the working class and not of Wall Street.
An argument that being progressive does not mean being stuck in the gloomy mindset of dystopian apocalyptic bummers. Solnit shares examples of hope, from her experience as an activist to stories of the Zapatistas, the WTO protests, the American civil rights movement, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Set in the not-too-distant 2024, Butler’s Parable novels show us the trajectory of our world with climate change and corporate power left unchecked. An African American teenager fights for survival in a world where the sea is rising, water is scarce, fires rampage across California, schools and cities are privatized, and the homeless are kept at bay by walls. People escape the horrors of reality with designer drugs and addictive virtual realities. In this dystopia, a politician rises up whose religious followers commit violent atrocities in a crusade to hold on to the past. His slogan: Make America Great Again.
A book about the power of tyranny in modern times that illustrates the frightening power of modern propaganda, where “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”
The pigs in charge of the farm sell off Boxer, the hardworking horse, to be slaughtered, and use the money to buy themselves whiskey. What better analogy for the Republicans defunding people’s health care, in order to give the rich tax cuts?
A chilling depiction of a world of repression, where women are property, nonwhites have been relocated to a segregated zone, and a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible informs all politics. Mike Pence would probably describe it differently.
A sweeping work of resistance and the human spirit. Hemingway captures something about the weight, and value, and beauty of life itself (as all great novels do) that is particularly inspiring here in the story of people fighting against fascism during the Spanish Civil War.