In 2014 we saw the world become more intolerant of dissent. A quotation usually misattributed to George Orwell seemed to be more frequently making the rounds on social media; “In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” It’s meaningful that those words, and Orwell too, would ring so true in this past year.

Chelsea Manning’s request for clemency was denied, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange remain confined, and what was lost in the media circus and purposeful character assassination leveled at them which continued in this past year is that these individuals told the truth about crimes committed by the U.S. government and that top officials have lied under oath to the congress and to the American people without consequence. What’s clear and often forgotten, or sidelined by strident misdirection, is that U.S. government agencies are the ones that deliberately broke the law and systematically violated the constitution, and while the revelations of these truths have not been credibly linked to any resultant physical injury to any person or any resultantly compromised agent of the United States, the truth-telling individuals who brought them to light seem to be the only ones being pursued and deprived of liberty in the name of “justice.”

ON the other side of the globe, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong was born and showed the world what smart, informed, peaceful demonstrations look like when a population decides to take on those in power, but this month the encampments were efficiently dismantled by government forces and many public figures remained silent in the face of economic intimidation and blacklisting from China.

Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution protestors.

In 2014, we saw attempts to muzzle and denounce artists who spoke out against the killing of children in Gaza, the injustice of poverty in the shadow of the World Cup, and to expose oppressive government censoring in Egypt. And in the US, the only arrests made around the cases of Mike Brown and Eric Garner seem to have been of activists who took to the streets to call for justice.

Paulo Ito’s São Paulo mural, “Food, Not Football.”

And around the world, from São Paulo to Athens to Ferguson we’ve seen what government’s with their increasingly militarized police forces look like when they are confronted with dissent.

Militarized police in Ferguson, Missouri.

As citizens we are surveilled and monitored, and thereby intimidated, to an extent not seen before in human history. And political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern University released their findings that the United States is no longer correctly termed a Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, that “the majority do not rule”, but rather ours is a system of “Economic Elite Domination”, which is to say a plutocracy, or an oligarchy.

One of Wisconsin’s Solidarity Singers, arrested for singing.

So we will need to use our voices in 2015. This past year street artists like Paulo Ito in Brazil, performance artists and activists like Pussy Riot in Russia, rappers like Ana Tijoux in Chile, and singers like the Solidarity Singers in Wisconsin sounded the clarion call and incite others to action. This year we’ll need more.

Pussy Riot attacked by whip-wielding Cossacks in Sochi.

Protest art from the streets of Ferguson and New York reminded us how individual voices can call us together and sustain movements.

Damon Davis applies raised hands to a building in a Ferguson street art project.

This is, after all, how social change happens…by a uniting of shared interests, by the spread of courage and the defeat of complacency, and sometimes, by just being fed up. Communication is key, and in the best of cases, truth-telling is as well. Artists very often do this most impactfully, in person and across media, whether though sounds or pictures or video. In Ukraine, where Ruslana kept spirits up through cold nights at the encampments with her song, the piano man of Kiev, Markiyan Matsekh, played Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor to show the battle lines of armored police, and the world, that they were thoughtful, intelligent people deserving of their rights and not of violence.

Markiyan Matsekh plays piano in front of riot police in Kiev.

In 2014, The Voice Project conducted successful campaigns advocating for the release of Moroccan rapper El Haqed, for the release of Tibetan singer Gebey in China, for mass dismissals in the cases of arrested Solidarity Singers in Wisconsin (our campaign even fact-checked by PolitiFact), and for leniency in the sentencing of Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan. And in 2014 we saw major surrenders and decreases in LRA related violence largely attributed to the defection messaging programs that we helped pioneer and support.

The release of El Haqed from prison in Morocco.

We stood up for the release of the artist Guo Jian in China, we helped Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina start both their Zona Prava initiative to protect prisoners’ rights as well MediaZona to report on the criminal justice system in Russia, and we worked with the Occupy Hong Kong and #UmbrellaRevolution activists to support the student protesters and pro-democracy movement there.

An image and message of solidarity from Peter Gabriel at Hong Kong’s democracy protests.

But we must do more. All of us must. As governments around the world continue to act more and more authoritarian in the service of the hegemonic power of monied interests and border-straddling multinational companies, as human rights are systematically transferred from humans to corporations, it will be easy to wonder if there is anything the individual can do — if there is anything one person can do that can make a difference. Victories will be hard won, setbacks inevitable. As one Tibetan singer was released, at least two more were imprisoned. We lost Pete Seeger in 2014, but perhaps a new generation will answer the call, as Questlove urged, “to be a voice of the times that we live in.” And the answers will be found in this coming year, as they always are, in our ability to come together.

Demonstrators carry an image of the eyes of Eric Garner through New York City streets.

Ursula Le Guin, in a stunning speech at the National Book Awards said:

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

She went on to say that “any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.”

And no matter how they try – the interests of privilege with their billions, the governments with their bombs and jets, the corporations with their attempts to manufacture consent – a single singer with a guitar can make a louder noise than all of them. As can a single artist with a can of spray paint, a single writer with a laptop, a single activist with a YouTube or Twitter account, a single woman with a balaclava. Help us support them in 2015.
-Hunter Heaney
Executive Director
The Voice Project

Solidarity at the Wisconsin State Capitol building in 2014.

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