From the beginning, the decisions they have made about how to work within the music industry – as well as refusing almost all interviews, they deny free tickets for their gigs to journalists, and work only with independent labels and record shops – have created a context of dissidence.
As in Egypt, they were able to build on years of local dissidence that had already created informal networks of friends and colleagues.
Shortly after Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president, began his flirtation with Aids dissidence in 2000, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) was created to respond to the HIV crisis in the country and the government's reluctance to deal with it.
Other similar works of protest followed, creating what the historian Martin Malia calls "a culture of dissidence"—an emerging public opinion in Russia which later repression proved unable to completely control.
Those familiar with Thompson's historical writings recognized in his peace activism the same concern that had preoccupied him throughout his scholarly life: creating a space for grassroots human agency and for moral dissidence against the arrogance of the powerful.
It gave Chinese dissidence a face and a cause; it confronted a government that the West is too apt to cower before; and, best of all, it made the Chinese government look incredibly stupid in creating a rival "Confucius Peace Prize" for politicians that the Chinese government approved of.
You have to listen to these dissidents and think about your own dissidence.
The former hesitated to make an open challenge, but the latter went into dissidence in 1860.
"This show is a form of dissidence — gay dissidence," said Mr. Ortega, the curator.
