Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes
I don’t know, it is a very quiet rebellion. […] I don’t get angry. I sit quietly in the corner and say 'no'.
Wilhelm, Albert. "An Interview with Bobbie Ann Mason." The Southern Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, 1988, p. 37.
His assumption about whether an army was “willing or able to train its guns on inoffensive people” was a little naïve. The Ottomans had massacred the Armenians, and soon the German troops would murder innocent civilians. As did the Japanese. The Russian Communists on many occasions massacred civilians engaging in passive resistance. In Cambodia, the Kmer Rouge Army killed almost 2 million, most of whom had educations which might have made them passive resisters. Islamic Fascist governments like Syria and Iran used heavy weapons to kill citizens in their own homes because they were in neighborhoods that housed many passive resisters. Extreme Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists regularly killed innocent civilians in their homes, on the streets or in busses, just to intimidate others to surrender to their religious and political demands. He was right that democratic governments and armies would not engage in such killing of their own people, but there are unfortunately still many other governments.
He advocated no cooperation with the British Colonial Administration which depended on Indian officials, administrators, clerks and other workers. The boycott strategy never worked in this case, but civil disobedience did. Boycott did work against the apartheid regime in South Africa a half century later however.
Bobbie Ann Mason is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky. Her memoir was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
