Music has long been used as a form of resistance, from civil rights movements to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, focusing on taboos and the breaking down of social barriers, features an exclusive new short story by Ariel Dorfman about a military trumpeter who plays a defiant, rebellious song on his instrument.
In honour of the story, we have compiled a playlist of music that has been used as protest and resistance from all over the world. The influence of these songs show just how powerful music can be as a form of rebellion.
Many artists on the list have been forced into exile or censored. Index on Censorship has teamed up with the award-winning makers of the documentary They Will Have To Kill Us First to launch the Music in Exile Fund, which will help support musicians in similar situations.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – Ode to Joy
Ode to Joy has been adopted by many protest movements around the world. Most notably the song was played on the streets of Chile in resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship. Demonstrators gathered outside prisons singing Ode to Joy, giving strength to the prisoners who suffered torture there at the hands of the regime.
Joan Baez – We Shall Overcome
We Shall Overcome is a key protest song of the civil rights movement. The song, which has been covered by various artists, was first used in 1945 by tobacco workers fighting for better pay in Charleston, South Carolina. The song, with its message of solidarity and hope, has been used in many protests around the world, not least in the 1950s and 1960s by activists in the American civil rights movement.
Vuyisile Mini – Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd
Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd (Watch Out, Verwoerd) is one of the most well-known songs in South Africa due to its association with the campaign against apartheid. Hendrik Verwoerd, who served as prime minister of South Africa until his assassination in 1966, became known as the “architect of apartheid” for his role in implementing the system of racial segregation. Unsurprisingly, he became the subject of many protest songs, including Ndodemnyama we Verwoerd by Vuyisile Mini. Mini became one of the most powerful organisers of the resistance, earning himself the moniker the “organiser of unorganised”. He was sentenced to death in 1964 on charges of sabotage and political crimes and is said to have sung the song while being led to the gallows.
November 2015 marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Many songs have been associated with the demise of the wall, which divided Berlin for nearly three decades, particularly Wind of Change by German heavy metal band The Scorpions. The song, one of peace and hope, was released a few months after the wall was torn down and became one of the top-selling singles of 1991. The music video to Wind of Change shows footage of the wall being removed.
Songhoy Blues – Al Hassidi Terei
The four members of Songhoy Blues met as refugees after being forced into exile by Muslim extremists who banned all music in Mali in 2012. In defiance of the extremists, they formed the desert blues band, refusing to have music taken away from them. They have since gone on to work with Damon Albarn of Blur and Nick Zimmer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, been on an international tour and were nominees for the arts category of the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards 2014.
Ramy Essam – Irhal
Irhal became known as the anthem of Egypt’s uprising against President Mubarak’s after singer Ramy Essam performed the song during the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square. Irhal, which urges the president to resign, became internationally known after Essam’s performance was posted on YouTube during the protests. After the revolution, Essam returned to Tahrir Square where he was arrested and tortured by the military council. He was offered safe city residence in Sweden following his arrest and has been living there since 2014.
Tropicália/Gilberto Gil – Miserere Nóbis
The Tropicália movement is a brief artistic movement that took place in Brazil in the 1960s. During the movement, which was co-founded by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, musicians expressed their resistance to the country’s military dictatorship through their music and their socially and politically charged lyrics. The movement only lasted around a year before being suppressed by the military regime. Gil and Veloso were arrested in 1969 and forced to live in exile in London for the political content of their work but returned to Brazil in 1972.
Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit, most famously performed by Billie Holiday, protests American racism and the lynching of African Americans. The song began as a poem written by teacher Abel Meeropol published in 1937; Who then set it to music and performed it as a protest song at various venues in New York in the late 1930s along with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan.
Chieftains and Sinead O’Connor – Foggy Dew
Foggy Dew is the name of several old Irish ballad. This version of the song chronicles the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin when Irishmen fought for the cause of Irish independence. During World War I, thousands of Irishmen served in the British forces. Many Irish nationalists felt they should have stayed in Ireland and fought for Irish independence, which is reflected in the song.
Killing in the Name – Rage Against The Machine
American rap-metal band Rage Against the Machine released Killing in the Name in 1992, six months after the Los Angeles riots, which were triggered after four white police officers were acquitted of beating black motorist Rodney King. The song is institutional racism and police brutality. Known for its excessive use of expletives, Killing in the Name originally received little air time.
Joe Strummer (The Clash) mural, London. Credit: Flickr / Matt Brown
The Clash – White Riot
When The Clash released White Riot, many people thought it was a song advocating some kind of race war. This couldn’t be further from the truth. With the lyrics, Joe Strummer was appealing to white youths to find a worthy cause to fight (or riot) for, just as many black youths had in the UK at the time. At its heart, it is a song about class and race.
Bob Marley – Get Up, Stand Up
Bob Marley is renowned for his songs about peace, love and resistance. With Get Up, Stand Up being one of his most well-known protest songs. Marley wrote the song with fellow Jamaican musician Peter Tosh as a challenge to oppression. The song is famed for the lyrics: “You can fool some people sometimes but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Pete Seeger – Joe Hill
Joe Hill was a miner, songwriter and union organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Hill was executed in America in 1915 following a controversial trial in which he was found guilty of the murders of John G Morrison and his son Arling. Hill refused to testify at his trial believing he would be worth more to the labour movement as a dead martyr than alive. After his death, Hill was the subject of songs by various artists, including Paul Robeson, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.
Sam Cooke – A Change Is Gonna Come
A Change Is Gonna Come has been covered by various artist but was originally written by Sam Cooke. The song is another civil rights anthem concerning the struggles of African Americans during the 1960s. Cooke was said to have been inspired to write to song by various events in his life, predominantly being turned away from a “whites only” hotel. The singer was shot and killed just before the song was due to be released as a single in 1964.
Tinariwen – Lulla
Tinariwen are made up of musicians from the Tuareg community, whose music reflects the issues faced by the Tuareg people. The musicians received military training when they were living in exile in Libya in the 1980s, and many of the members of Tinariwen were rebel fighters in the 1990 revolt against the Malian government. In 1991, the collective, who’s name translates to “the people of the desert”, left the military to focus on music on a full-time basis.
Eagles of Death Metal – People Have the Power
On 8 December, Eagles of Death Metal joined U2 on stage in Paris, just three weeks after Muslim extremists launched an attack at their concert at the Bataclan Theatre, killing 89 people, plus 41 in two other attacks. Together the bands performed a cover of Patti Smith’s People Have the Power, showing bravery and resistance against the terrorists who left the city in fear.
You can read the Ariel Dorfman’s new short story, All I Ever Have, about music as a form of resistance in the latest Index on Censorship magazine. Each magazine sale helps Index on Censorship fight for free expression worldwide. Order your copy here, or take out a digital subscription via Exact Editions (just £18 for the year).
Archangel on the roof of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, St.Petersburg, Russia. Credit: Akimov Igor / Shutterstock
Since the amended blasphemy law came into force in July 2013, Russian journalists have faced a growth of religious censorship. This is according to a new study by Zdravomyslie, a foundation that promotes secularism.
Insulting religious beliefs of citizens was previously regulated by the Code of Administrative Offences and punishable by a fine not exceeding 1 thousand roubles (around $15). But after the scandal of the punk-prayer of feminist group Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to two years in jail for a performance in the Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, the Russian parliament adopted amendments that criminalised blasphemy.
Since July 2013, “public actions, clearly defying the society and committed with the express purpose of insulting religious beliefs” has been declared a federal crime and is punishable by up to three years in jail.
Onegin interviewed 128 employees of dozens of media organizations, including a major national television channel, radio stations, newspapers and websites. The majority, 119, said that after the revised blasphemy law came into force, managers told them not to mention religions, religious problems, traditions and “different manifestations of unbelief”. Some media organisations even prohibited usage of words “God”, “Allah” and “atheist” in headlines.
A journalist at a sports news website told the researcher that censorship had extended to idioms. For example, headlines “Hulk has talent from God” (about a Brazilian forward playing for Zenit Saint Petersburg football club) and “God’s hand helped Maradona” (about the score of the Argentinian forward at the World Cup in Mexico in 1986) were corrected to exclude the word “God”. The second headline was corrected a long time after publication because editorial staff decided to check archived articles.
Media professionals involved in a production of entertaining content also faced censorship. For example, a respondent working for a sketch show told Onegin about a ban on jokes containing phrases like “God will forgive you” or “you are definitely descended from a monkey”.
However, exceptions to the general policy of avoiding religious issues were made for Orthodox Church, which was confirmed by over the half of all respondents. For example, a journalist working for a national television channel said that her colleagues were told not to show “non-traditional for Russia religious symbols and signs”. However, the term non-traditional was not specified, so journalists started to avoid showing any religious objects, except those associated with the Orthodox Christianity.
The authors of the report presented a list of the most undesirable topics, which according to the respondents are potentially violations of the law. First place went to protest actions against the Orthodox Church (according to 84% of respondents), the second was atheism and unbelief (49%) and third place was coverage of religious events (23%).
Journalists also gave Onegin examples of when they were told not to cover stories: cancellation of celebration of Labour Day because of a coincidence with the holy week of Orthodox Lent; cancellation of performances of the Cannibal Corpse rock group due protests by Orthodox activists; protests of Orthodox activists against Leviathan, a movie by Andrey Zvyagentsev; cancellation of an Lord of the Rings-related Eye of Sauron installation on a Moscow tower a critical comment by an Orthodox priest.
The researcher came to conclusion, that the new blasphemy law and political, social and cultural conditions formed around it “have had a serious impact on media organisations, limiting freedom of speech and indirectly turning them into an instrument of a dominating religious organisation – Russian Orthodox church” and prevent audience of Russian media from getting an objective picture of civil society.
However, pressure on the press in Russia comes from other religions too. In January 2015, tens of thousands people gathered at a rally against French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in Grozny, the capital of predominantly Muslim Chechnya region. Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov not only accused European journalists in “insulting feeling of believers”, but also threatened those in Russia who supported Charlie Hebdo, including editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow radio station Alexey Venediktov and former oligarch and vocal Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
In February 2015, another citizen of Chechen Republic was accused of insulting feelings of believers by posting a video on social networks. Also in February, the Investigative Committee began an initial inquiry into Tangazer opera staged in Novosibirsk theatre. In March, the first blasphemy case was opened in Ural region. In April, a user of the largest European social network, the St Petersburg-based VKontakte, was accused of insulting feelings of believers in his comments. At the end of October, VKontakte MDK was blocked by a St Petersburg court decision because it contained content that “insult feelings of believers and other groups of citizens”.
The imprecise wordings of the law and a wide range of its possible interpretations has arisen concerns of human rights activists. The severalonlinecampaignswerestarted to collect signatures under a petition calling for a repeal of the blasphemy law, but all of them failed to gain more than two thousand signatures.
The Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, alongside 16 NGOs including Index on Censorship, today voiced support for the UN joint-statement on human rights in Bahrain. The statement, delivered by Switzerland at the 30th session of the UN Human Rights Council, was co-signed by 33 countries, including 19 EU states and the United States of America.
The statement remains open for additional signatories until the end of the Human Rights Council session on 2 October 2015. The NGOs invite states who have not signed to do so and call on those who have to continue exerting collective pressure for human rights progress in Bahrain.
Letter
To the Governments of: Albania, Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Serbia, Slovak Republic, and Spain
24 September 2015
Excellencies,
We, the undersigned non-governmental organisations, write to voice our support for the joint statement on the human rights situation in Bahrain delivered by Switzerland at the 30th Session of the Human Rights Council (HRC).
Since the last joint statement on Bahrain in June 2014, the government has continued to curtail the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly. Human rights defenders, political opposition leaders, members of the media, and youth have faced intimidation, arrest, arbitrary detention, unfair trials and acts of reprisal by the authorities. Furthermore, negotiations of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR) for a programme of technical capacity building in Bahrain have stalled in the period since the June 2014 joint statement.
We urge your government, therefore, to sign the joint statement on Bahrain delivered by Switzerland at the HRC’s 30th session in order to refocus international attention on human rights in Bahrain and encourage the government of Bahrain to constructively address its ongoing violations.
International pressure on Bahrain continues to assist in addressing human rights violations in Bahrain, as reflected by the decision of the King of Bahrain to release prominent human rights defender Nabeel Rajab under a royal pardon after he spent over four months in prison for a tweet criticising the government.
It is critical, therefore, to take action now to reaffirm the high level of international concern over human rights conditions in Bahrain. To abandon collective pressure on Bahrain at a time when the situation is continuing to deteriorate would send an entirely wrong message to the Bahraini government, and undermine both internal and external efforts to foster genuine reform.
Switzerland has indicated that this joint statement will be open for additional signatories throughout the session. We therefore call on your government to recommit to supporting human rights in Bahrain, and to add your endorsement to this joint statement.
Sincerely,
Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB)
Amnesty International
ARTICLE 19
Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR)
Bahrain Institute of Rights and Democracy (BIRD)
Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS)
CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation
English Pen
European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR)
European Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (ECDHR)
Human Rights Watch
Index on Censorship
International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
Pen International
Rafto Foundation
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
World Organization Against Torture (OMCT)
The autumn 2015 issue of Index on Censorship magazine focuses on comparisons between yesterday’s and today’s censors and will be available from 14 September.
In the latest issue on Index on Censorship magazine Spies, secrets and lies: How yesterday’s and today’s censors compare, we look at nations around the world, from South Korea to Argentina, and discuss if the worst excesses of censorship have passed or whether new techniques and technology make it even more difficult for the public to attain information.
Smuggling documents and writing out of restricted countries has helped get the news out, and into Index on Censorship magazine over the years. In this issue, you can hear three stories of how writing and ideas were smuggled into or out of countries. Robert McCrum swapped bananas for smuggled documents in Communist Czechoslovakia; Nancy Martínez-Villarreal used lipstick containers to hide notes in Pinochet’s Chile and Kim Joon Young tells of how flash drives hidden in car tyres take information into North Korea.
Also in this issue, an interview with Judy Blume on over-protective parents’ stopping children from reading, Molly Crapabble illustrates a new short story from Turkish novelist Kaya Genç, Jamie Bartlett on crypto wars and Iranian satirist Hadi Khorsandi on how writers are muzzled and threatened in Iran. Don’t miss Mark Frary mythbusting the technological tricks that can and can’t protect your privacy from corporations and censors.
There’s also a cartoon strip by award-winning artist Martin Rowson, newly translated Russian poetry and a long extract of a Brazilian play that has never before been translated into English.
Spies, secrets and lies: How yesterdays and today’s censors compare?
SPECIAL REPORT
New dog, old tricks – Jemimah Steinfeld compares life and censorship in 1980s China with that of today
Smugglers’ tales – Three people who’ve smuggled documents from around the world discuss their experiences
Stripsearch cartoon – Martin Rowson’s regular cartoon is a challenge from Chairman Miaow
From murder to bureaucratic mayhem – Andrew Graham-Yooll assesses what happened to Argentina’s journalists after the country’s dictatorship crumbled
Words of warning – Raymond Joseph, a young reporter during apartheid, compares press freedom in South Africa then and now
South Korea’s smartphone spies– Steven Borowiec reports on a new law in South Korea embedding a surveillance tool on teenagers’ phones
“We lost journalism in Russia” – Andrei Aliaksandrau examines the evolution of censorship in Russia from the Soviet era to today
Indian films on the cutting-room floor – Suhrith Parthasarathy discusses the likes and dislikes of India’s film boards over the decades
The books that nobody reads – Iranian satirist Hadi Khorsandi reports on how it is harder than ever for writers in his homeland to evade censorship
Lessons from McCarthyism – Judith Shapiro looks at the impact of the McCarthyite accusations and fasts forward to address the challenges to free speech in the US today
Doxxed – When prominent women express their views online, they can face misogynist abuse. Video game developer Brianna Wu, who was targeted during the Gamergate scandal, gives her view
Reporting rights? – Milana Knezevic looks at threats to journalism in the former Yugoslavia since the Balkan wars
My life on the blacklist – Uzbek writer Mamadali Makhmudov tells Index how his works continue to be suppressed having already served 14 years on bogus jail charges
Global view – F0r her regular column, Index’s CEO Jodie Ginsberg writes about libraries; how they are vital communities and why censorship should be left at their doors
IN FOCUS
Battle of the bans – US author Judy Blume talks to Index’s deputy editor Vicky Baker about trigger warnings, book bannings and children’s literature today
Drawing down – Ted Rall discusses why US cartoonists are being forced to play it safe to keep their shrinking pay cheques
Under the radar – Jamie Bartlett explores how people keep security agencies in check
Mythbusters – Mark Frary debunks some widely held misconceptions and discusses which devices, programs and apps you can trust
Clearing the air: investigating Weibo censorship in China – AcademicsMatthew Auer and King-Wa Fu discuss new research that reveals the censorship of microbloggers who spoke out after a documentary on air pollution was shown in China
NGOs: under fire, under surveillance – Natasha Joseph looks at how some of South Africa’s civil rights organisations are fearing for the future
“Some words are more powerful than guns” – Alan Leo interviews Nobel Peace Prize nominee Gene Sharp
Taking back the web – Jason DaPonte takes a look at the technology companies putting free speech first
CULTURE
New world (dis)order – A short story by Kaya Genç about words disappearing from the Turkish language, featuring illustrations by Molly Crabapple
Send in the clowns – A darkly comic play by Miraci Deretti, lost during Brazil’s dictatorship, translated into English for the first time
Poetic portraits – Russian poet Marina Boroditskaya introduces a Lev Ozerov poem, never before published in English, translated by Robert Chandler
Index around the world – Max Goldbart rounds up Index’s work and events in the last three months
A matter of facts – For her regular Endnote column, Vicky Baker looks at the rise of fact-checking organisations being used to combat misinformation
