‘The times they are A-changing’. Bod Dylan 1964, an anthem of change for the time. Dylan’s biographer Clinton Heylin recounts how Tony Glover stopped by Dylan’s apartment in September 1963, picked up a page of the song Dylan was working on and read a line from it: ‘come senators, congressmen, please heed the call.’ Turning to Dylan, Glover said, ‘what is this shit, man’?. Dylan shrugged his shoulders and replied, ‘well, you know, it seems to be what people want to hear’. (wikipediA).

Idealism is a double edged sword, one person’s idealism is another persons tyranny. The current political rhetoric is on the edge of tyranny, the fringe becoming mainstream. Society is constantly being redefined, but when it becomes 92 cents worth of tyranny to every 8 cents worth of democracy, then something urgently needs to be readdressed, ‘without free press there is no democracy, it’s just propaganda’. We now live in an age of ‘outrage’ sociopathic behaviour of hate, and not only in the English language territories, the institutions of democracy are under threat, and for the time being this petri dish of intractability looks like its going to get worse, before it can get better.

Amnesty International has navigated these worrisome waters many times before, this present zeitgeist ‘the demonisation of politics’ is nothing new.

Amnesty International was founded in London in 1961, following the publication of the article “The Forgotten Prisoners” in The Observer on 28 May 1961, by the lawyer Peter Benenson. Amnesty draws attention to human rights abuses and campaigns for compliance with international laws and standards. It works to mobilise public opinion to put pressure on governments that let abuse take place. Amnesty considers capital punishment to be “the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights”. The organisation was awarded the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize for its “campaign against torture,” and the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 1978. In the field of international human rights organisations, Amnesty has the third longest history, after the International Federation for Human Rights and broadest name recognition, and is believed by many to set standards for the movement as a whole. Its mission statement: “Amnesty International’s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards." In pursuit of this vision, Amnesty International’s mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights.’ Campaigns to mobilise public opinion can take the form of individual, country, or thematic campaigns. Many techniques are deployed, such as direct appeals (for example, letter writing), media and publicity work, and public demonstrations. Often, fund-raising is integrated with campaigning. Amnesty’s logo the barbed wire represents “the darkness” (hopelessness) of people being put away in jail where they think nobody even remembers they are there. To top it off, they are imprisoned for unfair reasons, most likely because they have said or done something that seems to threaten the power and authority of the government to control its peopleʼs actions and even “thoughts!” They are political prisoners. The candle is represents Amnesty Internationalʼs commitment to remember that political prisoners are being held in prisons all over the world and AIʼs commitment to bring hope to the prisoners for their fair treatment and eventual release. But, remembering and hoping are not enough to make sure that something is actually done! Amnesty International knows that action needs to be taken on behalf of these prisoners, so that those who are detaining (keeping) them will reconsider and free them. Amnesty International believes that if you are feeling hopeless (darkness), it will do no good to just swear at the darkness. It will do no good to just complain! You must take action and “light the room” if you want to get out of the dark. Complaining gets you nowhere. Actions speak louder than words. Since the prisoners are not able to help themselves...after all they are in jail...it is up to others to help them. It is not enough to just sit around complaining about how unfairly some people are treated. Someone has to take action. (theacherweb.com) Speaking truth to power is as dangerous and difficult today as it ever was. In 2015 Amnesty International supporters across the world wrote 3.7 million letters, messages, emails and tweets in aid of prisoners of conscience — people jailed for telling someone in power what they didn’t want to hear or to be heard by others. (wikipedia)

The Oxford Dictionary has included a new Word of the Year ‘Post Truth’ and Amnesty have obviously picked up on this, what is ‘Post Truth’: Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief, ‘in this era of post-truth politics, it’s easy to cherry-pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire’ ‘some commentators have observed that we are living in a post-truth age’ (Oxford Dictionary). So it means more or less ‘the way we process facts when coloured by ideology’ so the demonisation of politics is a current reflection of this observation, its the unfactual counter arguments being provided by politicians, the persuasion that ideology doesn’t matter anymore and the dressing up of values as facts, democracy has always relied on trying to persuade others, the messengers using the language of the tribe, to provide the message, we determine the truth by the people we trust i.e. politicians and by the sources we trust, that’s how we know the truth, so demonising politics isn’t just a random observation, narratives need to fit the facts, what is being played out right now is that the narrative some politicians are choosing doesn’t support the facts, a demonization of politics begins to fill the vacuum, and it begins to get even darker when opposing views are sidelined and in some cases totally silenced, that’s a sign of an unhealthy democracy.

‘If liberty, means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear’. George Orwell preface to Animal Farm.

Amnesty International studiocrowd 'call proposal': contact Heather Deacon Creativepool Lead.