Dissident

The term dissenter (from the Latin Sidere " set", dissidere " set apart, settle, oppose " ) or critics of the system refers to a dissenters who openly expresses his line by the government or policy dissenting opinion. Generally, the term is used only for dissenters in dictatorships and totalitarian states, because the unhindered pronouncing one's own opinion in democracies is a fundamental right and therefore should be granted. However, dissenters in democracies are so named Chance.

History

The term was coined in 1573 in the Warsaw Confederation for the Protestants who were not members of the dominant state religion. In the 17th century it was a " dissenter " input to England as the name of Protestant groups, who were not willing to integrate into the Anglican Church.

In the 18th century, the term referred to those whom no one recognized. Since the 19th century, it is that which does not belong to a religious community. The members of the German Catholic associations, the so-called German Catholics, and the Protestant Free churches, the so-called Friends of Light, who joined forces in 1856 with the German Catholics to collar free Religious communities in Germany were officially called dissidents. Usual, the term was in Germany until at least the 1930s.

Also an enlightening teaching as came not only as a therapeutic method, but also as a general theory of culture to great influence psychoanalysis has produced its dissidents, after its founder, Sigmund Freud himself had been considered a long time as a dissident ( the established psychiatry ).

Roi Aleksandrovich Medvedev, in his book Let History Judge: towards the exile of dissidents in Stalinism and the emergence in the 1960s counter-movement to a democratic socialism The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism.

Presence

The term was used primarily from the 1970s for oppositional artists and intellectuals (especially civil rights ) of the communist rule range. Examples are Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky and Václav Havel. An example of another type of word usage is the case of nuclear power manager and later " nuclear dissidents " Klaus Traube.

However, degree and quantity of repression in East and West differed considerably. So dissidents were sometimes forcibly admitted to labor camps or psychiatry in the Brezhnev era. Similar practices occur among many other things against Chinese and Russian dissidents. The efforts of human rights organizations improve the situation only slowly, as the case of environmental activist Hu Jia shows.

In the GDR dissidents were generally referred to as Hostile -negative people and up in the 1970s by the Ministry for State Security ( Stasi) with similar methods as in fighting the Soviet Union. With the Honecker era, however, was moved to a more subtle, the Stasi specially developed for this purpose method, called decomposition. It included the secret conducted psychological destruction of opposition, thereby preventing the victim for further policy actions. Thus, the use of physical violence and detention could be largely avoided what the intent on her international reputation GDR leadership came to meet.

A common feature of all dissidents and the public criticism of the existing political system, away from the zeitgeist and mainstream and subconscious acceptance of personal disadvantages. In a broader sense today also generally significantly government- or system- critical intellectuals are called dissidents. So the name in the English -speaking world among others in the American Noam Chomsky is applied.

In February 2009, according to the non-governmental organization (NGO ) Reporters Without Borders worldwide were 66 so-called cyber-dissidents ( active on the Internet citizen journalists ) in prison.