A Quote by Edward Snowden
Too often we forget that social and political movements don't happen overnight. They don't bring change immediately - you have to build a critical mass of understanding of the issues.
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I don't know if I even consider myself a very political person. I have always had strong beliefs on important social issues. Politics have politicized social issues, but I don't know if social issues are in fact political. If anything, they are more human issues than they are political issues.
Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements.
Change Won’t Happen Immediately, as Nigeria’s Problems Didn’t Start Overnight
What's more important is that we talk about movements; change happens through movements. The movement to end slavery, the movement to bring justice for those who have been left out of the system, movements to include women, movements around sexual preference - all these movements brought about change.
If we are going to talk about the most recent of the "Indignados" movements in several countries of the world, including Europe, those are social movements but eventually they will evolve into political movements. This will happen because the traditional bourgeois parties have lost credibility after being the main political influence in most countries of Latin-America and Europe in the last 50 or 60 years.
Buddhism doesn't really have much time for political mass-movements. We are so trained to think of politics in terms of acting collectively, acting as part of mass-movements, that it's become hard for us to imagine a form of politics that is based on a high degree of introspection and self-examination.
[On social change:] What I say is that if one country is annexed by another, its nationality is not changed overnight. Social processes are often very, very slow.
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador lived through times of cruel and ruthless capitalism where the workers, the masses of the population, saw themselves living in a precarious state of employment and subsistence conditions. The impact of this reality took hold and impacted the evolution of the social situation of those countries and even though that produced movements that were not exactly political movements but social movements.
The only continent where social movements have led to political parties that have pushed through serious social and political reforms is in South America.
I think that you're smarter than we were, but we had two things: one is, in our naïveté we believed we could change the world. And number two, we believed that another world was possible. And once that belief took hold of some critical mass, a tiny minority nonetheless, but a critical mass of people, then the world did change.
Significant and seemingly impossible social and political change happens more often than we think, and it happens more rapidly than we realize. Even the most momentous change is always possible if one finds the right way to make it happen.
Political and social history are in my view two aspects of the same process. Social life loses half its interest and political movements lose most of their meaning if they are considered separately.
The experience of opposing mass movements was acquired by the KGB during perestroika. It was then that the politicians decided to develop and nourish mass movements for their purposes.
Feminism is a belief that although women and men are inherently of equal worth, most societies privilege men as a group. As a result, social movements are necessary to achieve political equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies.
...move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.
You build movements and keep people in a struggle when it feels productive. Anti-capitalists have typically been the people in movements who have declared every gain to be a trick of the capitalist class to buy us off. That line isn't very inspiring, and it shows no sensitivity to how social movements actually succeed.
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