The Price
of Resistance
This is a talk that Chris Hedges gave Monday, April 17, 2017 at
Princeton University in New Jersey.
In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America,
Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of
varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to
defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of
them are forgotten. Most of them are unknown.
These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had
common traits—a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a
distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to
people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant
culture as the enemy. They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20
years as a foreign correspondent. And to this day I set my life by the
standards they set.
You have heard of some, such as Vaclav Havel,
whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution in
Czechoslovakia, in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague. Others, no less great,
you probably do not know, such as the Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, who was assassinated in
El Salvador in 1989. And then there are those “ordinary” people, although, as
the writer V.S. Pritchett said, no people are ordinary, who risked their lives
in wartime to shelter and protect those of an opposing religion or ethnicity
being persecuted and hunted. And to some of these “ordinary” people I owe my
own life.
To resist radical evil is to endure a life that by the standards
of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your
career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is
to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is
to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to
the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character.
When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a
commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq
and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war,
reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their
heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by
the same career-killing contagion.
Ruling institutions—the state, the press, the church, the
courts, academia—mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures
of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and
authority. In times of national distress—one has only to look at Nazi
Germany—all of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through
their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. And our own
institutions, which have surrendered to corporate power and the utopian
ideology of neoliberalism,
are no different. The lonely individuals who defy tyrannical power within these
institutions, as we saw with the thousands of academics who were fired from
their jobs and blacklisted during the McCarthy era,
are purged and turned into pariahs.
All institutions, including the church, Paul Tillich once
wrote, are inherently demonic. And a life dedicated to resistance has to accept
that a relationship with any institution is often temporary, because sooner or
later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your
conscience will not allow you to make. To be a rebel is to reject what it means
to succeed in a capitalist, consumer culture, especially the idea that we
should always come first.
The theologian James H. Cone in
his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the
cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the
world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that
suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and
the first last.”
Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in
Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the
souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized
on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating
presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent
presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe
that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be
defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their
suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only
possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the
mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The
cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching
victory out of defeat.”
Reinhold Niebuhr labeled
this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.”
Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and
‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr
understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And
Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of
extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to
say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten
tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient
force in history.”
The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The
words of the Hebrew prophets, as Abraham Heschel wrote,
were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet
feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he saw and faced an
unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very
opposite of what his heart expected.”
This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of
resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you get
treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all
that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle
validates itself.
Daniel Berrigan told
me that faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good. The Buddhists
call this karma. But he said for us as Christians we did not know where it
went. We trusted that it went somewhere. But we did not know where. We are
called to do the good, or at least the good so far as we can determinate it,
and then let it go.
As Hannah Arendt wrote
in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the only morally reliable people are not
those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say
“I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human
life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we
must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We
must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the
surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.
I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which
lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel
called in his great essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living
in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal
to be a part of the charade.
“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day
to take up this most unusual career,” Havel wrote. “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.”
The long, long road of sacrifice and suffering that led to the
collapse of the communist regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change
possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did
not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the
system. They did not even know what, if anything, their tiny protests, ignored
by the state-controlled media, would accomplish. But through it all they held
fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and
just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were
marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers
and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good
to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around
them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go
unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of
authority and the rot of the state.
I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious
Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as
the singer Marta Kubisova approached
the balcony of the Melantrich
building. Kubisova had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after
the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire
catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by
the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly
flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom
had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the
anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I
understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of
rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that
I knew that the communist regime was finished.
“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd
sang in unison with Kubisova. [Editor’s note: To see YouTube photographs of the
1989 revolution and hear Kubisova sing the song in a studio recording, click here.]
The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters
depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in
Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the
crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days
later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There
was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was
broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the communist
authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother
with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did
not work.
His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the
students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after
I left for Bucharest to cover the uprising in Romania, was renamed Palach
Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.
We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no
longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will
protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’état carried out
not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the
corporate state.
We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction
of our nation, our culture and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are
not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state.
Any act of rebellion,
no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at
corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger
movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the state
consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen
in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we will keep this possibility alive. If we
do not, it will die.
Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague” is not driven by
ideology. He is driven by empathy, the duty to minister to suffering, no matter
the cost. Empathy, or what the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman called
“simple human kindness,” becomes in all despotisms a subversive act. To act on
this empathy—the empathy for human beings locked in cages less than an hour
from us [here in Princeton], the empathy for undocumented mothers and fathers
being torn from their children on the streets of our cities, the empathy for
Muslims who are demonized and banned from our shores, fleeing the wars we
created, the empathy for poor people of color gunned down by police in our
streets, the empathy for girls and women trafficked into prostitution, the
empathy for all those who suffer at the hands of a state intent on
militarization and imposing a harsh cruelty on the vulnerable, the empathy for
the earth that gives us life and that is being contaminated and pillaged for
profit—becomes political and even dangerous.
Evil is real. But so is love. And in war—especially when the
heavy shells landed on crowds in Sarajevo, sights so
gruesome that to this day I cannot eat a piece of meat—you could feel, as
frantic family members desperately sought out loved ones among the wounded and
dead, the concentric circles of death and love, death and love, like rings from
the blast of a cosmic furnace.
Flannery
O’Connor recognized that a life of faith is a life of confrontation:
“St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: ‘The dragon sits by
the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go
to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter
what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or
into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and
this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any
country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”
Accept sorrow—for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful at the
state of our nation, the world and our ecosystem—but know that in resistance
there is a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, a strange, transcendent
happiness. Know that if we resist we keep hope alive.
“My faith has been tempered in Hell,” wrote Vasily Grossman in
his masterpiece “Life and Fate.” “My faith has emerged from the flames of the
crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not
man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is
impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of
senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be
conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem,
the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders,
reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb,
blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling
to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a
small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not
been destroyed even now, then evil will
© 2017
TruthDig
Chris Hedges writes
a regular column for Truthdig.com.
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a
foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books,
including: War Is A Force
That Gives Us Meaning, What Every
Person Should Know About War, and American
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His
most recent book is Empire of
Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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