The Defending Dissent Foundation (DDF), previously known for many years as the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation (NCARL) and formed in 1960 as the National Committee to Abolish HUAC, is a national not-for-profit advocacy organization in the United States, dedicated to defending the right of political dissent.
Based in Washington, D.C., NCARL was founded in 1960 as a group opposing the House Un-American Activities Committee (known popularly by the acronym HUAC) of the U.S. House of Representatives. It formed in Southern California as an outgrowth of 1950s efforts against McCarthyism that had been led by the Southern California Civil Liberties Union (a unit of the American Civil Liberties Union) and the Citizens Committee to Preserve American Freedoms. Called The National Committee to Abolish HUAC, the group changed its name to NCARL after HUAC was abolished in 1975. In 2007, NCARL changed its name again, to the Defending Dissent Foundation.
The organization's founding director and long-time head, Frank Wilkinson, was cited for contempt by HUAC in 1961 and sent to jail on May 1, 1961. In 1984 it was discovered that, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had compiled a 132,000-page file on Wilkinson.
DDF identifies itself as a member of several coalitions of U.S. advocacy groups:
- Charity and Security Network
- Rights Working Group
- OpentheGovernment.org
- United for Peace and Justice
- Liberty Coalition
- Free Expression Network
- Alliance for Justice
- Cybersecurity Working Group
- D.C. Bill of Rights Committee
The organization publishes a monthly newsletter, archived online.
Famous quotes containing the words defending, dissent and/or foundation:
“The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better.... Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)
“In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)