Guns and Roses

The tyranny of the weak, which Mahatma Gandhi had once harnessed to deal a body blow to colonialism, is still alive and well. Interestingly, it is wielded by the young, who are generally perceived to repose more faith in aggression.

olga misik, protest in moscow, Vladimir Putin, russia riot police, olga misik reads constitution to police, — Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Source: Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS/File)

Today, the face of nonviolent resistance is that of Olga Misik, reading the Russian constitution to Vladimir Putin’s riot police during a crackdown on protesters in which over 1,000 were arrested. She takes on the mantle of Tank Man, the unidentified protester who had halted an armoured column in Tiananmen Square in 1989 by refusing to get out of the way. And of the anti-Vietnam war protester variously identified as George Edgerley Harris or Joel Tornabene, snapped by Bernie Boston during the March on the Pentagon in 1967, spiking the guns of military police with carnations. At the same protest, French photojournalist Marc Riboud immortalised Jan Rose Kasmir, a girl offering a flower to a police line. In an interview for Smithsonian Magazine, Riboud had said: “I had the feeling the soldiers were more afraid of her than she was of the bayonets.” Her image, titled The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet, is still widely seen in exhibitions and on posters.