You become a dissident because you are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances
March 9th, 2010
“If we see
the end of this country
it will come from the right and
our failure to provide people with the
basic necessities of life,” said Johnston.
“Revolutions occur when young men see the present
as worse than the unknown future. We are not there. But it
will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office
who are denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors
in Congress, who say we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the
history of the world has existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the
seeds for the destruction of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the
United States of America. They would say they hate the people they are arrayed
against. But the whole idea of the United States is that we criticize the
government. We remake it to serve our interests. They do not want
that kind of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that
democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a
world where they are right and that is it. If we do not
want to do it their way we should be vanquished.
This is not the idea on which
the United States was
founded.”
It is hard
to see how this can be
prevented. The engines of social
reform are dead. Liberal apologists, who
long ago should have abandoned the Democratic
Party, continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf
corporate state and Barack Obama while the working and middle
class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs. Liberals self-
righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury by
Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal
class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs,
the more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited
American liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do
not hold out any hope for their reform. We have entered
an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote,
“the best lack all conviction and the worst
are full of passionate
intensity.”
“If we end
up with violence in the streets
on a large scale, not random riots, but insurrection and
things break down, there will be a coup d’état from
the right,” Johnston said. “We have already
had an economic coup d’état. It will not
take much to go
further.”
How do we resist?
How, if this descent is inevitable,
as I believe it is, do we fight back? Why should
we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair?
Why not carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace
of the corporate state and spend our lives attempting to satiate
our private needs? The power elite, including most of
those who graduate from our top universities and
our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold
out for personal comfort.
Why not us?
The French
moral philosopher Albert Camus
argued that we are separated from each other.
Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate.
We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated.
And yet Camus wrote that “one of the only coherent philosophical
positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man
and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of
hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate,
without the resignation that ought
to accompany it.”
“A living man
can be enslaved and reduced to
the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned.
“But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he
reaffirms the existence of another kind
of human nature which refuses
to be classified as
an object.”
The rebel,
for Camus, stands with
the oppressed—the unemployed workers
being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the
corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor
in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and
those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them
does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the
Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice
while carrying out acts of oppression.
It means open and direct
defiance.
The power
structure and its liberal
apologists dismiss the rebel as
impractical and see the rebel’s outsider
stance as counterproductive. They condemn the
rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and
their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical
language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue
that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel,
however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand
with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation
grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book
contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel
is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The
rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two
beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at
the way things are and the courage to see that
they do not remain the way they are.
The rebel is aware that virtue is
not rewarded. The act of
rebellion defines
itself.
“You do
not become a ‘dissident’
just because you decide one day to
take up this most unusual career,” Vaclav
Havel said when he battled the communist regime
in Czechoslovakia. “You are thrown into it by your personal
sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external
circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed
in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work
well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does
not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power.
He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not
attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises
nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—
and he offers it solely because he has no other way
of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions
simply articulate his dignity as
a citizen, regardless of
the cost.”
