Questioning the Authorities Trivia Quiz

Answer: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson remains one of the United States' most enduring historical figures. He embodied the American Revolution's challenge to the established British authority. Born April 13, 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia, he was an architect, inventor, educator and writer. He is, however, best known for his stirring rhetoric in support of the American revolt against the British Empire. Jefferson was the principal author of the American Declaration of Independence and an outspoken advocate for democratic choice by the citizenry.

Jefferson, at root, was mistrustful of centralized government in all forms and remained a proponent of local decision-making. Despite being both the second Vice President and third President of United States, he remained a critic of a strong central government. In November 1787, while serving as the fledgling US's Ambassador to France, he was able to chronicle the French Revolution. In the oft-quoted passage above, written in a letter to his friend and fellow Virginian, James Madison, Jefferson expressed his concern over the provision in the new US Constitution that created a chief executive branch with defined constitutional powers. Jefferson emphasized his position by exclaiming that to avoid tyranny required the "natural manure" of the blood from both tyrants and patriots.

Answer: Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a modern anarchist "jack of all trades". Trained as a physician, Guevara saw first hand the deplorable conditions suffered by the poor of Latin America. His experiences coalesced in a belief that only through a violent Marxist revolution would the plight of the underprivileged improve. Guevara was a key figure in the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959. The once healing physician became a ruthless military commander. After the revolution, Guevara served as commander of the infamous La Cabaña Fortress prison where hundreds of Batista loyalist were tortured and killed.

Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to try and spread the Marxist ideology to mainland South America. In 1966, he went to Bolivia and attempted to rally support for a coup of the government. Despite the instability that existed within Bolivia, Guevara's ideas were not well received. Backed by only a token force, Guevara was defeated and killed by the Bolivian army on October 9, 1967. Guevara's good looks and forceful personality made him an enduring, iconic rallying symbol for Marxist revolutionaries all over the globe.

Answer: George Orwell

George Orwell was the pen name for Eric Arthur Blair. He began writing in the 1920s and served as a journalist and espoused Marxist ideology. Initially, he struggled to get work and was exceedingly poor. He wrote about his experiences and in 1933 published his first successful novel "Down and Out in Paris and London".

He adopted the name George Orwell to spare his family the harsh tale of his life. Orwell wrote the seminal 20th Century novels "Animal Farm" in 1945 and "Ninety Eighty Four" in 1949. "Animal Farm" dealt with the betrayal of the Marxism revolution by Stalin. "Nineteenth Eighty-Four" was Orwell's bleak vision of the future where totalitarian governments use war, surveillance, propaganda and terror to destroy individualism and maintain tyranny.

The referenced quotation is a powerful condemnation of unfettered State control and is taken from Chapter 3 of "Nineteen Eight-Four".

Answer: Karl Marx

Karl Marx did not invent the economic concept of socialism but is inextricably linked to the rise of the socialist state in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Marx himself was the son of a successful German Jewish attorney and married into an upper class family. Marx was trained as a historian and economist, but became increasingly radicalized and took to writing aggressive political tracts.

He was convinced that the industrial revolution created the spark for a class conflict between the owners of capital and the laboring classes.

His philosophy coalesced in 1848 into a 12,000 word pamphlet called "The Communist Manifesto". Within the "Communist Manifesto" Marx urged the workingmen to rise up and unite to assume power. The radical ideas espoused in the Manifesto ultimately caused Marx to be expelled, country by country, from continental Europe. Marx was ostracized from the universities, unable to secure a teaching post, and at times could not support his family.

He spent most of the rest of his life in England, where he continued to publish articles and pamphlets about the coming class war between the workers and the capitalists.

His seminal economic treatise "Das Kapital" was first published in 1867. Marx died in 1883 convinced that the cause of worker revolution was inevitable. Marx's ideas served as the political science fuel for the Communist revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam and numerous other countries.

Answer: Galileo

Galileo Galilei is one of the towering intellects of the Renaissance period. Galileo was foremost a mathematician and astronomer whose discoveries included documenting lunar mountains and valleys, sunspots and four of the moons Jupiter. Galileo found himself at odds with conventional thought and the powerful Catholic Church by his support of the "Copernican" theory that the Earth rotated about the Sun. Spared a trial for heresy in 1616, Galileo was censured by the Roman Church and prohibited from espousing the heliocentric theory.

In 1632, Galileo defied the Church and published the "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" convincingly arguing the truth on the movement of celestial bodies. He was convicted of heresy by the Catholic Inquisition but spared a death sentence due to his great fame and otherwise steadfast piety. Galileo spent the last 10 years of his life under house arrest in his Tuscan home.

In time, the Copernican theory was proved correct, and Galileo was vindicated.

However, Galileo's heresy conviction has never been rescinded. Galileo's uncompromising refusal to accept the limitations of conventional wisdom in the face of fact and logic remains an important cornerstone of scientific research.

Answer: Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst never carried a weapon or commanded troops in battle, but she did plan, fight and win a major campaign. Born on July 15, 1858 in Manchester, England, as Emmeline Goulden she founded the Women's Franchise League and later the Women's Social and Political Union which championed the cause of women's right to vote in the UK. Like many agents for change, Pankhurst's movement used the tactics of disobedience. Her and her fellow suffragettes' willingness to use such techniques as organized mass demonstrations, window smashing, arson and hunger strikes surprised the entrenched male political machine. Pankhurst herself was jailed for civil disobedience on numerous occasions. Her efforts proved successful when women over 30 were granted the right to vote in 1918 and achieved full voting rights equal to men in 1928. In 1999, "Time Magazine" named Pankhurst one of "The 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century".

The cause of women's rights required the sacrifice and efforts of leaders across the globe. In the US, Susan B Anthony led the fight for voting rights, but did not live to see the passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution enacted in 1920. Nellie McClung championed the cause of women's right in Canada. Kate Sheppard, who appears on the New Zealand ten-dollar note, led the fight that made New Zealand the first modern democracy to adopte equal voting rights for women.

Answer: George Carlin

Artists and entertainers have long been sources of rebellion against convention. Often the battleground is between perceived standards of decency and the limits of free expression. Such was the case with the American comedian and writer George Dennis Patrick Carlin. He was born in New York City in 1937 and grew up in a poor mixed race area of Manhattan's Upper East/Harlem area. In the late 1950s, he turned to stand up comedy after serving in the US Air Force. Originally Carlin performed clever word play routines that were not controversial and only touched the surface of the emerging hippie and drug culture in the US. In the early 1970s, Carlin increasingly rebelled against language and topic limitation imposed by late night television hosts and comedy club owners. Carlin's humor turned blacker and was filled with cursing and sexually suggestive words. At the same time, his popularity with younger audiences increased.

Carlin's legal problems started when he released a hugely successful album in 1972 called "Class Clown". Included on the album was a routine entitled "The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television". In July 1972, in Milwaukee Wisconsin Carlin was arrested for obscenity while performing the routine. He was released, but his album became the center of a suit the culminated in a US Supreme Court decision deriding the material as indecent redefined the nature of illegal obscenity in the US. Carlin became a symbol of the comedian as a counter-establishment hero. His performances became filled with edgy political and social commentary that spared no sacred cow or institution. Carlin's popularity was a major factor in launching cable television network HBO as "alternative" location for "adult" themed discourse. Carlin died in 2008, never retreating from his iconoclasm and rebellion against thought control and censorship.

Answer: Albert Einstein

It is hard to think of Einstein as a challenger of authority, but the father of modern physics was both a man of free thought and radical ideas. Einstein was an avowed pacifist who abhorred the military application of science and the advent of nuclear war. Einstein was a Zionist but openly criticized the use of violence as a tactic when forming the State of Israel. Einstein marched in civil rights demonstrations, and supported many entertainers and academics tarred by the McCarthy-era blacklists. Einstein's prodigious contributions to science allowed him the freedom to champion his social causes.

Einstein's quote was made in a 1901 to another physicist. In time, Einstein's observations about the universe became the status quo that is now challenged by todays scientific radicals. The irony of the rebel becoming the conservative was not lost on Einstein who later said "to punish me for my contempt of authority, fate has made me an authority myself."

Answer: Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a towering voice in the mid 20th century philosophical and literary world. While most classify Camus as an existentialist, it is more accurate to describe his philosophy as a synthesis of existentialism and anti-nihilist, absurdist ideology. During his life, Camus felt such disdain for classifying thought that he refused to consider his work as philosophical in nature. Camus' absurdist thesis was that man will search for meaning in life, but that man did not have the ability to find or comprehend the answers. Thus, man will find no meaning in life and must accept the unbearable emptiness that is existence.

Camus abhorred totalitarianism and control of free will in all forms. Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre worked together within the French Resistance during World War II. After the war, there was a rift between the two literary legends when Camus criticized the increasingly totalitarian drift of Marxist regimes like the Soviet Union. Camus remained steadfast in his opposition to organized limits on human freedom, whether from religion, social or political groups. Camus became one of the youngest winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 but died tragically at the age of 46 in 1960.

Answer: Mohandas Gandhi

Perhaps no one better symbolizes the modern challenge to authority than Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi. Gandhi's combination of inspiration and wildness and his willingness to sacrifice his own welfare revolutionized civil disobedience and the power of organized opposition. As the leader of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi advocated non-violent non-co-operation as a better means to achieve Indian independence from the UK than armed rebellion. Gandhi's willingness to suffer jail and self-imposed deprivation steered the creation of an independent India in 1947. Tragically, soon after this success Gandhi, became a victim of the violence he strove to avoid, when he was assassinated by an anti-parition terrorist named Nathuram Godse.

In an ironic twist, the man most responsible for achieving change through nonviolent action did not receive a Nobel Peace Prize. After's Gandhi's death in 1948 the Nobel committee instead named no honoree stating "there was no suitable living candidate". Gandhi's inspired other heroes of nonviolent change like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and Nelson Mandela in South Africa.