Early in February 1943 Mohandas Gandhi informed the Governor General of India, Lord Linlithgow, that he had decided to undertake a fast for a period of twenty-one days. Gandhi was at that time a prisoner at the Aga Khan palace in the city of Poona, near Bombay. He and his associates had been arrested on 9 August 1942 after the All India Congress Committee had adopted a resolution calling for the withdrawal of British rule over India. Violent protest demonstrations and attacks on government property by angry Indians following the arrest of the leaders was met by ruthless repressive measures. With thousands of nationalists thrown into prison and with the overwhelming coercive authority of the British Indian Government mobilized against them, the leaderless and unarmed Indian adherents and supporters of the Congress Party were beaten back and cowed down.

The election of Hugo Haase to the Co-Chairmanship of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1911 was an event of immense importance for the future of German Social Democracy. It was Haase who served as the principal spokesman of the opposition to the cooperationist policies of the majority during World War I. It was he who led that opposition out of the SPD in 1917. After the war, as co-chairman both of the revolutionary government and of the Independent Social Democratic Party, he helped to insure that the German movement would remain permanently divided.

In the autumn of 1883 a small, anonymous penny pamphlet bearing the provocative title The Bitter Cry of Outcast London appeared in the London bookstores. Its impact was so immediate and cataclysmic that it must be considered one of the great pieces of Victorian reform literature. According to contemporary opinion the pamphlet provoked an “immense interest” in and “drew attention universally to the subject” of the dwellings of the working classes, and by the winter of 1883 it was unanimously agreed that urban slum conditions had “assumed the dimensions of a primary question” and had become “the subject of the day”. Alfred Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, stated in 1913 that it was almost impossible to recapture “the sensation which such a pamphlet as ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’ made when it was first produced”. Suddenly, almost overnight, it seemed, England awoke to the grim facts of the slums. “The revelations concerning ‘Outcast London’”, commented Reynolds Newspaper, “cause a tremendous sensation and thrill of horror through the land…” In January 1884 the Pall Mall Gazette wrote that The Bitter Cry had been echoing from one end of England to the other, and commented, ”We shall have to go back a long time to discover an agitation on any social question in England which has produced so prompt, so wide-spread, and, as we believe, so enduring an effect.” Two years after its publication it was reported that The Bitter Cry “rang through the length and breadth of the land. It touched the hearts of tens of thousands, and awoke deep feelings of indignation, pain, and sympathy in every direction.”

In the Machno movement (Machnovščina), which took place in the Ukraine in the years 1918–1921, two components can be distinguished, a partisan movement, and an anarchist movement.