On 1/9/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
First, a salute to Meryl Streep for her heroic act of chastising the
Truthdig
When Fear Comes
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/when_fear_comes_20170108/
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More7
Posted on Jan 8, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "The Gulag Archipelago," his profound meditation
on the nature of oppression and resistance in the Soviet gulags, tells the
story of a man who was among prisoners being moved in the spring of 1947.
The former front-line soldier, whose name is lost to history, suddenly
disarmed and killed the two guards. He announced to his fellow prisoners
that they were free.
"But the prisoners were overwhelmed with horror; no one followed his lead,
and they all sat down right there and waited for a new convoy,"
Solzhenitsyn
writes. The prisoner attempted in vain to shame them. "And then he took up
the rifles (thirty-two cartridges, 'thirty one for them!') and left alone.
He killed and wounded several pursuers and with his thirty-second cartridge
he shot himself. The entire Archipelago might well have collapsed if all
the
former front-liners had behaved as he did."
The more despotic a regime becomes, the more it creates a climate of fear
that transforms into terror. At the same time, it invests tremendous energy
and resources in censorship and propaganda to maintain the fiction of the
just and free state.
Poor people of color know intimately how these twin mechanisms of fear and
false hope function as effective forms of social control in the internal
colonies of the United States. They have also grasped, as the rest of us
soon will, the fiction of American democracy.
Those who steadfastly defy the state will, if history is any guide, be
decapitated one by one. A forlorn hope that the state will ignore us if we
comply will cripple many who have already been condemned. "Universal
innocence," Solzhenitsyn writes, "also gave rise to the universal failure
to
act. Maybe they won't take you? Maybe it will all blow over."
"The majority sit quietly and dare to hope," he writes. "Since you aren't
guilty, then how can they arrest you? It's a mistake!
"Does hope lend strength or does it weaken a man?" Solzhenitsyn asks. "If
the condemned man in every cell had ganged up on the executioners as they
came in and choked them, wouldn't this have ended the executions sooner
than
appeals to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee? When one is already
on the edge of the grave, why not resist?"
"But wasn't everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest?" he
asks. "Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their knees,
as if their legs had been amputated."
Resisting despotism is often a lonely act. It is carried out by those
endowed with what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Reinhold-Niebuhr ;) calls "sublime
madness." Rebels will be persecuted, imprisoned or forced to become hunted
outcasts, much as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are
now. A public example will be made of anyone who defies the state. The
punishment of those singled out for attack will be used to send a warning
to
all who are inclined to dissent.
"Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people
emerges, people who are that and nothing more," Solzhenitsyn writes of
those
who see what is coming. "And how they were laughed at! How they were
mocked!
As though they stuck in the craw of people whose deeds and actions were
single-minded and narrow-minded. And the only nickname they were christened
with was 'rot.' Because these people were a flower that bloomed too soon
and
breathed too delicate a fragrance. And so they were mowed down."
"These people," he goes on, "were particularly helpless in their personal
lives; they could neither bend with the wind, nor pretend, nor get by;
every
word declared an opinion, a passion, a protest. And it was just such people
the mowing machine cut down, just such people the chaff-cutter shredded."
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, reporters
and editors lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did
not want to be touched by the same career-killing contagion. They wanted to
protect their status at the institution. Retreat into rabbit holes is the
most common attempt at self-protection.
The right-wing cable shows were lynching me almost hourly. Soon I was given
a written reprimand and public rebuke by the newspaper. I was a leper.
The machinery of the security and surveillance state, the use of special
terrorism laws and the stripping of civil liberties become ubiquitous. The
lofty rhetoric of liberty and the reality of the chains readied for the
public creates magic realism
(http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/magical-realism.html ;) . Reality and
the
language describing reality are soon antipodal. The pseudo-democracy is
populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists,
pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens. Nothing is as it is presented.
Demagogues, Solzhenitsyn reminds us, are stunted and shallow people.
"Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty,"
he
writes.
"The overall life of society comes down to the fact that traitors were
advanced and mediocrities triumphed, while everything that was best and
most
honest was trampled underfoot," he observes. Ersatz intellectuals,
surrogates "for those who had been destroyed, or dispersed," took the place
of real intellectuals.
"After all," Solzhenitsyn writes, "we have gotten used to regarding as
valor
only valor in war (or the kind that's needed for flying in outer space),
the
kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten another concept of
valor-civil valor. And that's all our society needs, just that, just that,
just that!"
This kind of valor, he knew as a combat veteran, requires a moral courage
that is more difficult than the physical courage encountered on the
battlefield.
"This unanimous quiet defiance of a power which never forgave, this
obstinate, painfully protracted insubordination, was somehow more
frightening than running and yelling as the bullets fly," he says.
The coming arrests mean that a wide range of Americans will experience the
violations that poor people of color have long endured. Self-interest alone
should have generated sweeping protest, should have made the nation as a
whole more conscious. We should have understood: Once rights become
privileges that the state can revoke, they will eventually be taken away
from everyone. Now those who had been spared will get a taste of what
complicity in oppression means.
"The traditional image of arrest is also what happens afterward, when the
poor victim has been taken away," Solzhenitsyn writes. "It is an alien,
brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for hours on
end, a breaking, ripping one, pulling from the walls, emptying things from
wardrobes and desks onto the floor, shaking, dumping out, and ripping
apart-piling up mountains of litter on the floor-and the crunch of things
being trampled beneath jackboots. And nothing is sacred in a search! During
the arrest of locomotive engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room
containing his newly dead child. The 'jurists' dumped the child's body out
of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out of their
sickbeds,
and they unwind bandages to search beneath them."
"Resistance," he writes, "should have begun right there, at the moment of
the arrest itself. But it did not begin." And so the mass arrests were
easy.
And what at that point constitutes victory?
"From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind
you," he writes. "At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: 'My life
is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about
it.
I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die-now or a little
later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner
the
better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have
died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien
to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to
me."
"Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble,"
Solzhenitsyn writes. "Only the man who has renounced everything can win
that
victory."
The last volume of Solzhenitsyn's trilogy chronicles camp uprisings and
revolts. These revolts were impossible to foresee.
"So many deep historians have written so many clever books and still they
have not learned how to predict those mysterious conflagrations of the
human
spirit, to detect the mysterious springs of a social explosion, not even to
explain them in retrospect," Solzhenitsyn writes. "Sometimes you can stuff
bundle after bundle of burning tow under the logs, and they will not take.
Yet up above, a solitary little spark flies out of the chimney and the
whole
village is reduced to ashes."
How do we prepare? Solzhenitsyn, after eight years in the gulag, answers
this too.
"Do not pursue what is illusory-property and position; all is gained at the
expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell
night. Live with a steady superiority over life-don't be afraid of
misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the
same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to
overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and
hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet
can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, and if both ears can
hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us
most
of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart-and prize above all else in the
world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold
them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do
not
know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how
you
are imprinted in their memory!"
Why Meryl Streep's Golden Globe Speech Is So Important in the Trump Era
Chris Hedges Talks With Michael Gecan About How to Build Organizations to
Empower Ordinary Citizens
The Three Big Reasons Republicans Can't Replace Obamacare
Hollywood Gets a Clue About Inclusion, Meryl Streep Gets Political at 2017
Golden Globes (Video)
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
C 2017 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Signup for Truthdig's newsletter
