Welcome back everybody. I feel incredibly
privileged this morning to have the
role of introducing Kumi Naidoo to you. It
was about 20 years ago I think, when I
was about three years old, when
Kumi and I first met. At that time he
was the Secretary-General of the Civicus, which is a large coalition of civil
society organizations around the world
dedicated to providing space for citizen
voice in action but his legacy and his
commitment to progress and equitable
socially inclusive will that deeply
cares for our environment and again in
our culture we see the earth as our
mother how we nurture and care for one
another has been Kumi's lifetime 
legacy, and so brother, I'm deeply moved
and privileged, as a friend, as the
Director of Amnesty International to
invite you to come and share your
thoughts with us this morning. Ladies and
gentlemen, Kumi Naidoo.
Thank You Marcus.
I have to say I was very relieved with
that introduction you know because it
was short and sweet and warm. I was
recently invited to give a speech in my
speech was ten minutes and they took 15
minutes to introduce me. So I should
start with a light reflection about my
first time in this house, Rhodes House. it
was the 4th of March 1987. I was 22 years
old, I was on trial for violating the
state of emergency in South Africa and I
just fled South Africa into exile. I'd
never been out of South Africa before so
I landed at Heathrow and the immigration
folks called the folks here at Rhodes
House to say 'we got a guy here with a
one-page thing that says he's got a
scholarship to Oxford, can you confirm it?'
They confirmed it thankfully. I
arrived here six months before I was
supposed to start and so I was told take
a bus to Oxford and when you get to the
bus station take a taxi to Rhodes House.
I had never taken a taxi in my life before.
So I get to Rhodes House, it was about
7pm. It was the first time in my
life I in which I encountered
something called croutons. I'd never
had the stuff you put in the soup, I've
never had that before, but the main thing
is I hadn't slept for four days because
I had been on the run and it was the
anxiety and adrenaline of getting out of
the country and so on. So they took me to
the room which was on the top floor. I
believe there's about ten rooms there
and I was the only person on this floor so the curtains were
far apart and I mean the curtains were drawn,
and I was just exhausted, I collapsed. I
thought sure I made it down safe so I
fall asleep at about ten o'clock at
night and the night before,
during the night it snowed and the
spires were all caked with snow so at
about 12 o'clock I hear a knock at the door.
Because I had been on the run for the
last sort of year,
the worst thing to hear was a knock on
the door, so I woke up with a
shock and a very nice woman walked into
my room and said 'Sir, can I
offer you some tea and toast?'. I looked at
her, I looked at the slope so I'd never
seen snow in my life before, I'd never
been called sir before, by a white or
black person, I'd never been offered
breakfast in bed before. For a brief
moment I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.
[Laughter & applause]
The moment of history that we find
ourselves in is one that we could call a
boiling point or convergence of crises
and what Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm
Emanuel said 'A good crisis is a terrible
thing to waste'.
A Dutch philosopher friend of mine
describes the current moment of history
as one that you could call global moral
panic that is characterized by the
following trends. First, a rise of
authoritarian power and this we see not
only with Donald Trump,
but with Modi in India, Erdoğan in
Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, in Italy and so
on and if you look what has been planned
to happen in the United States today,
which is a raid, a mass raid on immigrant
families that would ensure that children
who are legitimately in the United
States will be separated from their
parents, and you start asking the
question what is the definition of
fascism which includes amongst other
things undermining of the media,
misinformation, dividing people on the
basis of identity, undermining public
institutions and so on, we come to a
uncomfortable conclusion if we want to
be brutally honest in our analysis that
we are seeing the rise of fascism in the
world at the moment. The second trend is
deepening oligarchic wealth that is the
deepening inequality that we see in the
world with the so-called 1% accumulating
more and more while the majority are
excluded. Now some of you might have
heard of a congresswoman from New
York,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez more often known as
AOC, who recently suggested that one of
the ways to address deep inequality in
the United States would be to increase
the taxation level to 70% on those that
earn more than 10 million a year. Now
there was quite a lot of outrage on the
part of the business community and
people of wealth but does anybody know
what the tax rate in the United States
was in the forties, in the thirties and
forties? Ninety per cent. Righ for the top wealthiest.
So essentially what we've had over the
last, even if you are not somebody who
wants to embrace a complete collapse of
capitalism and if you accept that
capitalism with all its flaws is
something that we have to deal with, even
within the capitalist system, the
question of taxation has been one that
has gone significantly in a direction
that takes us away from equality.
The third is the rise of xenophobia, and the
rise of xenophobia today is connected
across the world in ways that we are
ignoring at our own peril. So for example:
I was just in Australia and I heard
about Steve Bannon's visit, I was in
Greece and I heard that Steve Bannon was
involved there, and I will shock you now
by saying that I have a very, very strong
agreement with Steve Bannon when, in a way
in which I disagree with most
progressives on this, when Steve Bannon
says that culture follows politics not,
sorry,
politics follows culture, culture
does not follow politics, and in that
what we see in this movement of people
away from the values of human rights and
anti-racism and so on in the opposite
direction, it is in fact a way in which
the far-right in particular have got
extremely strategic in terms of how to
actually shift people in their direction
by
using division, fear and hatred to ensure
that that happens. I mean bear mine when
Donald Trump announced his presidency in
Trump Tower
he started up by in his first statement
calling all Mexicans rapists or maybe
they're a few of them are okay he said.
But these three trends are then
accompanied by the existential crisis of
climate change and as you probably
remember from October last year the
scientific community, by the way the
largest scientific enterprise in the
history of humanity, which is the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, declared that we have 12 years to
get emissions to peak and start coming
down and by the end of 2030 for
us to reduce levels by fifty per cent
based on 2010 levels, and everybody sort
of had two days in the newspaper of this,
but what that said was that humanity, if
we do not succeed in doing this, and some
of us have been worrying about this for
decades, that the end result is humanity
is on a suicidal trajectory to
irreversible catastrophic runaway
climate change. Now let me as I see many
of you get very sad as I say that and
you're wondering whether you should be
having kids and so on which are the
kinds of questions that people are
asking all of the world right now. Let me
tell you some good news, you have
probably heard people like myself on
occasion say save the planet, save the
environment, save the climate, the good
news is the planet is just fine. The
planet actually does not need saving
because if we continue on that
trajectory that we are on,  we warm the planet up to a point where we
are depleting our soil, we're depleting
our water resources and the heat coming
together where that means that we
destroy the ability of humanity
to exist on the planet, because we cannot
produce food and those of us who come
from hot climates already have a good
taste of what is in store for us. So the
end result of catastrophic climate
change is we will be gone, the planet
will still be here, and the good news is once we
become extinct as a species the forest
will recover, the oceans will replenish
and so on. So understand that the
struggle to avert catastrophic climate
change is nothing more and nothing less
than securing our children and their
children's futures, and where are
children today? Our children across the
world, inspired by a young Swedish
teenager Greta Thunberg, are leading the
fight on climate change with the tagline
Fridays for Future. They have
mobilized millions of young people
around the world and on 20th of
September it's likely we will see the
biggest ever climate mobilization where
they have challenged parents to stand
together with them and to say to our
political leaders it cannot be business
as usual, Nature does not negotiate and
you are playing political poker with the
future of our children, not simply with
the political poker on the future of the
planet as many of us should say, because
see if Steve Bannon was in the climate
movement he wouldn't say the planet
because he would say that doesn't
resonate with ordinary people,
he would say parents and grandparents,
and by the way I've been saying that
before Steve Bannon said it by the way. So I
marched with the kids in London, you know
a couple months ago and I can tell you
their slogans, their creativity and all
is much better than even people in
communications departments of some of the
biggest NGOs and advertising
companies. So for example two of the
slogans was as we walked past
Downing Street where the Cabinet meets,
two young girls picked up a sign saying
'You can get better cabinets at
Ikea' and my favorite was, my favorite was
'Keep Earth clean, it's not Uranus'. I
tried that in Germany, it didn't work in
in translation.
So in the moment that we find ourselves
in, we need to be looking for new
narratives to make sense of how deep the
crisis is and what changes we need to
make and I have found in the context
where we see the kind of devastation
that we've seen in Raqqa and in Aleppo
and other parts of the Middle East, where
we see leaders who are largely speaking
democracy on the one end but acting
differently on the other, and in this
context I have found the quotation that
I'm going to share with you now very
powerful but I should say that you know
I find a challenge these days in my role
speaking at meetings like this because
part of what I'm supposed to do is like
you know inspire people to get active
and so on and so I was speaking to the
United States and just talking about how
deep the different crisis we have in
terms of the economy in terms of climate
and so on and the
question-and-answer time somebody put up
the hands and said 'Dr. Naidoo have you heard
of Martin Luther King?' and I said yes I
did, he inspired many young people
in my country to stand up against
apartheid system and then she asked 'Do
you know what his most famous speech was
called?' Anybody? Yeah so thinking it was a
trick question I said it very gently I
said 'I Have a Dream' and she shouted back
'Yes! It was I Have a Dream but when I
hear you speak it sounds like You Have a
Nightmare!'
The forests are collapsing, inequality is
deepening and so one of the
challenges of the moment of leadership
is how do we fight find the right
balance between speaking truth to power
on the one hand, or as we would say in
the township not bullshitting people
right, you know telling people that
actually we are in a deep systemic crisis
and that humanity at the moment is on a
suicidal trajectory, but how do you tell
a message like that in a way that does
not say to people it's too late, that you
cannot get involved, that your
contribution doesn't make a difference
and that's what we need to do, and I have
found in this quotation from Martin
Luther King speaking in the mid-1960s a
source of inspiration which I want to
share with you: [Martin Luther King]: Modern psychology has a word
that is probably used more than any
other word in psychology. It is a word,
'maladjusted'. It is a ringing cry to
modern child psychology. Maladjusted.
Now of course we all want to live the
well-adjusted life in order to avoid
neurotic and schizophrenic personalities
but as I move toward my conclusion I
would like to say to you today in a very
honest manner that there are some things
in our society and some things in our
world of which I'm proud to be maladjusted
and I call upon all men of goodwill to
be maladjusted to these things until the
good Societies realize I must honestly
say to you that I never intend to adjust
myself through racial segregation and
discrimination. I never intend to adjust
myself to religious bigotry. I never
intend to adjust myself to economic
conditions that will take necessities
from the many to 
give luxuries to the few and leave
millions of God's children smothering in
an airtight cage of poverty in the midst
of an affluent society.' So I want to just
repeat the last words 'I never intend to
adjust myself to economic conditions
that will take necessities from the many
to give luxuries to the few when
millions of God's children are
smothering in an airtight cage of
poverty in an affluent society'. That was
a verdict on the United States' reality
at that time. If it was valid in the mid
sixties in the United States, it's a
thousand times at least more valid today
and it is valid across the world. In a
longer version of the speech he actually
calls he makes a call way says a call
upon decent women and men around the
world to come together to set up a new
International Association to be known as
the International Association for the
Advancement of Creative Maladjustment so
I want to suggest to you that what we
really need today in the world is some
serious creative maladjustment. We have
adjusted to inequality that that is immoral and indefensible.
We have adjusted to an economic system
that is measured in a way that is
problematic and false. Let me say what I
mean by that. The most powerful number
single number in the world is the GDP
number right, but GDP as was said in a
book by Lorenzo Fiaromonti, a
colleague of mine when I worked at
Civicus, GDP: gross domestic problem, the
world's most powerful number because for
example in GDP measurements, which is
what drives us, if you chop down a forest
it's a positive tick for GDP, there's a
whole range of negative activities that
actually happen that if you exploit
people and pay them less
and you drag out more profit
then in fact you are getting a positive
take on GDP. GDP was not given to us by
any religion or God,
it was created by human beings, it is not
as it hasn't been around for ever and
ever amen,
it was something that emerged in the
thirties, so basically this whole package
of the way the economy has gone has to
be challenged. I had a very troubling
moment in January which say would you
which is a personal moment which I had
with my daughter
Naomi. So I was at the World
Economic Forum and now you go to
the World Economic Forum at Davos, every
year they talk about inequality, they're
all very concerned about inequality
right so anyway I go there and I'm on
CNN and I get asked so what do you think
that the World Economic Forum can do to
address inequality so I said well I
don't believe they can do anything to
address it because it was here that the
narratives for deregulation for lowest
levels of taxation, of actually ensuring
that we undermine the power of the
states and so on has happened and if you
look at the response to the 2008
financial crisis or even the 1997
financial crisis, the response was system
recovery, system protection, system
maintenance, but what we should have
learned from these crises is what we
need right now is system innovation,
system redesign and system
transformation. So my daughter who's 27 saw
me do this interview and she sends me a
whatsapp message and says 'Dad, have you been
reading my my organization's website, you
sound so much more progressive than
I've ever heard you sound'. It was quite humbling
to have my daughter basically say to
me you're just a you know middle-of-the-road
guy.
She works for a sustainable economic justice
organization called the Sustainable
Finance Lab. So basically my first idea
that I want to share with you is that I
think even those of us in
progressive movements who are in the
forefront of fighting for climate
justice for economic inequality for
gender equality and so on
I want to humbly say that we are also
suffering from the problem of having
adjusted to things that we never should.
Having said that, I want to suggest to
you that today the biggest disease, the
biggest disease we have in the world is
not influenza that it affects many
people, but it's a disease that you could
call affluenza, and affluenza I would
define as a pathological illness where
the overwhelming majority of people in
the world have been led down a road to
believe that the meaningful decent life
comes from more and more and more
material acquisitions, that your life can
really only be measured substantially by
what capital you accumulate and the kind
of lifestyle that you lead in affluence
terms. The sad reality is that this
disease does not only afflict the
wealthy at the top, it actually affects
everybody because in a way one of the
reasons why some super wealthy people
like Donald Trump are able to actually
win over people, is because there's a sense
of aspiration that people have been led
to believe that that is the normal life
and so on. So let me just tell you a very
uncomfortable statistic: if everybody in
the world were to have the average
lifestyle that folks in Western Europe
in the United States and the OECD
countries have, according to WWF, the
World Wildlife Fund, from many years ago,
we would need between five and eight
planets to deliver that level of
consumption and unless we are getting
serious about addressing the question of
consumption, asking this question not
simply in an ecconomist way but asking
it in a way with at least some modicum
of spirituality, some modicum of
intergenerational solidarity, because
essentially
we are governing this planet at the
moment as if we don't have children and
grandchildren coming after us, we are
actually basically issuing a mass death
penalty to the future generation by our
inaction.
So affluenza is something that we have
to address and to put it simply we have
to address the unequal consumption
patterns in this world. You know when I
was at Greenpeace, one of the things that
people used to ask me quite often is, why
is Greenpeace not talking more about
population and population increase, and I
believe that we all need to be talking
about population by the way, population
is very cultural sensitive, you know it's a
very sensitive topic because people
you know people in predominantly Global
South countries you know tend to have
more kids and so on. The bottom line is the
best strategy to address population it's
simple it's not rocket science it is to
get serious about gender equality right.
If we get serious about gender equality
women take control over their lives and
are able to actually chart their own
course. But let's be very clear I used to
get this question even from Greenpeace
supporters and so on in the wealthy
parts of the world, but I used to
uncomfortably say to them I've not done
the absolute accurate calculation but it
probably takes about a hundred kids in
London to equal the consumption of one
kid in Africa at least okay so to look
at the question of population without
looking at the question of consumption
is a bit of a cowardly way of reading
the situation that we are in. So how do we
recover humanity right now? If you
look at the collective challenges we
face in the world, at the root cause you
will see a deficit of empathy, moral
courage and unity. In short a critical
lack of humanity. The need to see
Humanity in the people that you have a
difference with
critical, is a critically needed
commodity today. So to those who think
that it's ok to demonize the people that
voted for Donald Trump or the people
that voted for brexit, let me say quite
clearly, you're not being helpful. Unless
we can see the humanity of the people
that were influenced to vote in
particular ways, unless we can see them
as our mothers, our fathers, our brothers
and our sisters, we are being lazy as
activists. Activism is not simply about
going and trying to corral the people
that already agree with you.
Activism is about humbling yourself and
going, sorry please don't clap only, I've got
five minutes left, [laughter] you know real activism
is about humbling yourself, understanding
the way people are, understanding why
they are there, if they have a homophobic
view, if they have a sexist view, if they
have a racist view, understand why they
arrived at that point and do the hard
work to shift them back to decency. Activism cannot be equal to simply
convening you know people together in
different locations around the world and
telling ourselves that we on the right
side of history and continuing to talk
to each other right, because too much of
activism, too much of the efforts by good
people in the world and I'm not only
talking about core activism but I'm also
talking about a range of good
initiatives where we try to have
conversations, but we are having a
conversation in an echo chamber that is
getting more and more fortified by
keeping the majority of the people out.
If you look at the language that we use
in which we try to move people right, our
language is alienating, I'll give you a
personal example, by the way every
creases are making I made these errors
okay so I'm just trying to follow what
Albert Einstein once said when he said
the definition of insanity is doing the
same
over and over again expecting to get
different results, I'm at least 
challenging myself. But let me give you
an example, I'm on a little inflatable
boat in the middle of the Arctic in 2011
going to occupy an oil rig that was going
to start drilling for oil or exploring to
drill for oil in the Arctic and I look
at the slogan of my colleagues have
written and it said 'Stop
Arctic Destruction', and I'm like in this
very rough waters, I can't swim - my
brother went to national television in
South Africa after I got arrested and said
I don't really understand what the issue
about the Arctic is, but I know he must
be deeply committed because he's a
useless swimmer and if he
took a chance to go to the Arctic, he must
be really committed, so my colleague
was riding the boat says to me you know
don't worry I think they could see that
I was nervous said they said don't worry Kumi,
you know if you fall in this water
you'll survive for at least two hours
because the suit that you have, you know
if you followed normal thing you did in
three minutes because of a hypothermia
and because it's so cold right, so I look
at the waves I think
if I fall those waves are so big it
might take two hours for them to find me,
and then I had this thought if I kicked
it here tonight this morning, 99.99% of
the people I love, my uncles my aunts, my
friends in South Africa, my friends in
Africa, won't know what that slogan I was
carrying 'Stop Arctic Destruction',
right so I was discussing it with my
daughter who was then sort of sixteen and
she said 'Dad you know what would have
been a better slogan: Save Santa Claus
Now' but think about it right, so
when I raised it with my colleagues they said
oh no that's you know that's that's you
know that's trivializing the issue, but
when Donald Trump said make America
Great Again,
it was simple right, it was a dog whistle
- basically saying to his base make
America white again, because quite
frankly when I look
the United States when you say make
America great again, probably it means
going and looking at the high quality of
life that the indigenous peoples of the
United States had way before European
settlement, maybe that's the time when
America was the greatest, so basically
we have to get smarter about how we
think about how we shift people right
now, and we have to be clear that the
problem we have was put well by a French
sociologist in the 70s, a kind of guy
that was on the boundary of brilliance
and insanity,  called Louis Althusser, let me
just check part of history when I was a
student at Oxford if I said Louis Althusser at least 50% of the people would
know but this would be a good reflection
of how the politics of what we read has
changed, and have any of you ever heard of Louie Althusser? One, but you can check the age factor there.  [laughter]
So Althusser in the 70s, okay there
are few people, Althusser in the 70s made a
very important contribution when he said
most people think that governments and
corporations control people by the
deployment of what he called the
repressive state apparatus, that is the
use of the army, the police, formal laws
and so on, and of course he conceded that
that does constrain the theater of how
people can resist directions of
injustice that governments might pursue,
however, he said the more insidious and
powerful form of control is not the
repressive state apparatus but it is the
ideological state apparatus by which he
meant the framework for religion, the
framework for education, social norms and
cultures,
and patterns of acceptability in terms
of how social norms play themselves out
and importantly the framework for the
media, and so today when you look at a
country like the United States it is rare
that the United States government
needs to deploy its repressive state
apparatus because it's ideological state
apparatus has got the people tied up in
knots.
Okay I mean you know 90% of the people
six months after 9/11 happened knew very
clearly that Saddam Hussein was not
responsible for 9/11, but ten years after
9/11 in the United States, I was living
there then, still a majority of people in
the United States genuinely believed
that you know, so I want to do a quick
experiment and then I want to conclude
just to make this point, this is a very
important point which we underestimate
right so a little bit of experiment, how
many of you have watched CNN
International? Okay keep your hands up.
Now
How many of you who've got your hands up have
watched CNN International think that CNN
International is a ultra-left, left-wing
or ultra liberal news source? Okay almost
nobody, you're iffy, a few people are iffy, but
nobody really thinks that they are ultra
left source. Now in the United States the
people don't see CNN International, they see a watered-down version known as CNN
or CNN Headline News right, but within
the political continuum in the
United States
you got the Fox News from the far right
and you've got CNN and MSNBC actually
MSNBC is supposedly more to the left and
then you got CNN right next to it and
then ABC and so on in between right, so
think about it, a source that is seen
as quite mainstream in the international
context
is seen as left or ultra-left in the
US contexts so when you got 40% of the
American people who are now addicted to
Fox News right, how do you, and that's the
40% that's sticking with Trump since day
one, so if we do not get creative about
understanding where people are in terms
of their consciousness, how did they get
there, and how do we shift them to
decency, we are not engaged in activism
and I share with you something I learnt
when I was in my teenage years as an
activist, this was a wisdom that
came out of the Philippines which said
go to the people, live with them, learn
from them. Start with what they know,
build on what they understand, so that
when the struggle is won, the people
should say we have done it ourselves. So
I want to conclude with a story which
is intended to be motivational, but it is
sad, it's a true story, it's sad so focus on
the motivational side and try and not
worry too much about the sadness.
When I was 22 years old when I was
fleeing to this place, I had a
conversation with my best friend at that
time, a guy called Lenny Nidau and we
were both fleeing into exile in
different directions.
I was 22, he was 22 and six months,
he was a bit older than me and he asked
me a question 'Kumi, what is the biggest
contribution we can make to the course
of humanity'
I was 22 at the time, my
friend Lenny was way ahead of me, so I
just shrugged my shoulders and said, give
our life, and he said you mean going
participating in a demonstration getting
shot and killed and becoming a martyr
and in South Africa at that time
that was happening on an every weekend
type of situation especially in my
province where I lived,
and I said yeah guess so and he said
that's the wrong answer, he said it's not
giving your life, but giving the rest of
your life. Now I have to tell you my
friend Lenny, he was like the only person
who understood the intersectionality
between social justice and environmental
justice and so on, in fact at that time
we believe quite confidently that he
was only one of like 5,000 voluntary
vegetarians on the entire African
continent, he was basically way ahead of
his time.
So I hugged him, we shed our tears and we
fled in different directions. Less than
two years later while I was here at
Oxford I get the call that Lenny and
four young women from my home city
Durban, were brutally murdered by the
apartheid regime as they were crossing
into the country from Swaziland. Their
bodies had so many bullets in it the
parents couldn't even recognize them at
the mortuary. So I had to think deep and hard
about this distinction that he was
making between giving your life versus
giving the rest of your life. This is a
very profound and deep distinction what
he was saying is that the struggle for
justice, economic justice, social justice,
environmental justice, climate justice,
these struggles are marathons and they are
not sprints and the best commitment that
those of us, like each and every one in
this room here today, who has had the
privilege and the opportunity to
understand that injustice, and has
acquired the abilities educationally and
otherwise to contribute to the justice,
to eradicating that
injustice the best contribution we can
make is having the tenacity the
perseverance and the courage to continue
to push and push and push until success
is achieved. Put differently what he was
saying is the struggle for justice is a
marathon
not a splint right and so I want to
conclude in this way and why I say it's
an optimistic story is for each and
every one of us in this room today, we
have a simple choice, we can say that our
life's work that lies ahead of us will
be characterized by what I would call
incremental tinkering and improvements
when what is needed right now is in fact
substantial systemic and structural
change. It is not to say that there is
not a link and a positive creative
organic link between delivering projects
and programs that serve communities at a
grassroots level and so on, there is
immense ethical and moral value in that,
it is a good place to start, it's a bad
place to finish. If we don't ask the
questions, why is it that I need to do
work to set up a shelter for women who are
survivors of domestic violence, and we
say okay the end result of that is is
create as many safe shelters and refuges
for women, and we only do that, that's a
problem. It's important we start there
but then we have to say well why are
women landing up here and usually the
answer is that there is an absence of
domestic violence legislation, there's an
absence of training the police force, the
judiciary and so on to handle these
cases sensitively, and that's where the
emphasis is, so if we don't push for the
policy changes and the governance
changes that create the symptoms that
most of us end up having to treat and we
don't ask ourselves about the root causes
we end up in a place where history will
judge us badly, that we were called upon
to have the moral courage to ask the
difficult questions about how do we
create an economy that is fair and just,
how do we create
a pattern of consumption that ensures
that future generations can thrive on
this planet, and how can we ensure that
the injustices of the past, whether they're
against indigenous peoples, women, people
living with disabilities and so on,
are addressed with seriousness. So to each
and every one of you in this room, if you
are anything like me, there will be many
days when you wake up read the news and
you feel desperately sad, I want to say
to you when you hit those moments, just
remind yourself that the world would be an
even more pessimistic place were it not
for the work that each and every one of
you are doing in the different contexts
that you find yourself. There will be
people who will try to demean and
undermine the importance of your work
because you are trying to push against
the status quo and conventional thinking
but it is precisely when there is
resistance that you know you are working
and now definitely my last sentence:
I'll end with one from Mahatma Gandhi
when he said first, actually there is
contestation whether he really said it but
it works well so I'll say that he really said it, he
said: 'First they ignore you, then they
fight you' sorry, 'first they laugh at you',
so I got it completely wrong, 'first they ignore
you, then they laugh at you, then they
fight you, and then you win.' For Amnesty
and for many other organizations because
like Amnesty I got people in chairs of
boards in prison, executive directors
being harassed and put on trial, offices
being raided and that's the story of the
majority of civil society organizations
around the world including in the United
States and Europe right now,
right so the good news is they're not
ignoring us, they're not laughing at us,
and the fact that they are fighting
so hard, if Gandhi and whoever really said
that quotation were right, then
let's hope we are just one step away
from winning. Thank you very much.
