Word: hungering
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When it comes to publicity stunts, it doesn't get much more desperate - or dangerous - than a hunger strike. From college campuses in the Midwest to the oil fields of Kazahstan, the practice has become a daily, global phenomenon that has been by turns successful, gruesome, tragic and sometimes all of the above. In 1981, a 27-year-old member of the Irish Republican Army named Bobby Sands led a hunger strike at Her Majesty's Prison Maze in Belfast, where he was serving time for gun possession, and used the attention to win a seat in the British parliament...
...suffer the most who will conquer," he declared shortly before his death. Three years later, 89 strikers were released from Mountjoy after less than three weeks without food; their British captors wanted to avoid creating more political martyrs if they could help it. (Read: Site of IRA Hunger Strike Haunts Northern Ireland...
...protest colonial rule and later to protest Hindu-Muslim violence. He once broke a fast when a group of tearful rioters laid their machetes at his feet. In 2006, newly declassified government records show that Winston Churchill would have preferred to let Gandhi die in prison during his 1942 hunger strike; his war cabinet managed to convince him that this would have been disastrous...
Jailed suffragists like Alice Paul used hunger strikes in the early 20th century to rattle President Woodrow Wilson, who denounced such tactics as appalling and "unladylike," though he later buckled amid a public outcry over the forced feeding of the protesters and agreed to support the 19th Amendment granting women the vote. During World War II, a group of conscientious objectors at Connecticut's Danbury prison staged a 135-day strike against segregated dining. As a result, Danbury became the first federal facility with integrated meals...
...course, sometimes the sympathy - and the concessions - never come. From 2004 to 2006, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein launched three separate hunger strikes during his war-crimes tribunal, protesting that the court lacked legitimacy and had failed to provide adequate security for his defense lawyers (three of his attorneys were killed during the proceedings). But the strikes only resulted in feeding tubes and occasional mockery; one Fox News headline proclaimed: "Saddam Ends Hunger Strike After Skipping One Meal...