Re Arthur Williams' editorial Mob Rule (June 24):
As Nelson Mandela's extraordinary life leading social change draws to a close, I can't help but think of how he, like so many other brave folks before, thankfully paid no attention to law-and-order Lilliputians, like Mr. Williams. Your associate news editor's advice to Mandela would apparently have been "put a sock in it", "behave yourself" and just cower down to the powers-that-be. For it doesn't matter, Mr. Williams says, if the mob's cause is just.
Few of the great social changes in history would have gone anywhere had such deference to authority been paid. Mr. Williams turns to statements by a young Abe Lincoln, but ignores how with maturity, the president came around to the cause of the Abolitionists who frequently resorted to so-called mob rule to make their point. Abe would have stayed in the same conservative rut as Mr. Williams appears to be in had it not been for brave reformists who literally putting their lives on the line against injustice, no matter what that took.
The same can be said about the women's suffrage movement. Countless decolonization struggles of the 20th century, the U.S. civil rights movement and anti-apartheid struggles. In these and so many other historic cases, disobeying legitimate authority was a prerequisite to protecting the oppressed. As for Northern Gateway, in calling for the rule of law there, Mr. Williams neglects the inherent unlawfulness of all incursions into First Nations territory. Within B.C., the pipeline route is entirely through lands that were never bought, surrendered or covered in treaties. Under Canadian law, today such takings would be clearly labelled thievery.
When Art Sterritt says that all means necessary will be used in this struggle he is speaking on behalf of peoples who owned - and still own - the land. This adds to the strength of their doing whatever is needed to stop this environmental disaster-in-waiting. I prefer to Mr. William's submissive perspective that of Henry David Thoreau who advocated the right, indeed the duty, for citizens "to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable."
Change and justice never came about any other way.
Norman Dale
Prince George
