Word: strikes
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...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...
...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...
Outside prison walls, though, most hunger strikes are carefully planned with an end date in mind. Two weeks ago, Bolivian President Evo Morales ended a 5-day hunger strike to agitate for new election legislation (it worked), while actress Mia Farrow announced that she had gained nine pounds in preparation for a 3-week fast to draw awareness to starvation in Darfur, telling People magazine that magician and publicity generator David Blaine had called to offer some tips from the 44 days he spent suspended in a glass box above London's River Thames without food. On May 3, more...