Chris Hedges' Columns
Why We Resist http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071210_why_we_resist/
Posted on Dec 10, 2007 AP photo / Bela Szandelszky Thousands
of Hungarian demonstrators form a glowing peace sign in Budapests Heroes
Square to mark the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. Too few
Americans, Hedges argues, have taken action against war.
By Chris Hedges
The refusal to pay my taxes if we go to war with Iran, and the portion of my
taxes spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if we do not cut off funding
for these two conflicts, is not a means. It is an end. I do not know if my
refusal, and the refusal of others, will be effective in halting these wars.
All I know is that it is worth doing. The alternative, a complacency bred from
cynicism and despair, is worse. Refusing to actively resist injustice and
flagrant violations of international law, refusing to attempt to turn back the
tide of American tyranny, is surrender. It is the death of hope.
Acts of resistance are moral acts. They begin because people of conscience
can no longer tolerate abuse and despotism. They are carried out not because
they are effective but because they are right. Those who begin these acts are
few in number and dismissed by the cynics who hide their fear behind their
worldliness. Resistance is about affirming life in a world awash in death. It
is the supreme act of faith, the highest form of spirituality. We remember and
honor the names of those who, solitary when they began, defied their age. Henry
David Thoreau. Jane Adams. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Mahatma Gandhi. Milovan
Djilas. Andrei Sakharov. Martin Luther King. Václav Havel. Nelson Mandela. It
is time to join them. They sacrificed their security and comfort, often spent
time in jail and in some cases were killed. They understood that to live in the
fullest sense of the word, to exist as free and independent human beings, meant
to defy authority. When the dissident Lutheran pastor
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken from his cell in a Nazi prison to the gallows,
his last words were this is for me the end, but also the beginning.
Bonhoeffer, who returned to Germany from Union Theological Seminary in New
York to fight the Nazis, knew that most of the citizens in his nation were
complicit through their silence in a vast enterprise of death. He affirmed what
we all must affirm. It did not mean he avoided death. It did not mean that he,
as a distinct individual, survived. But he understood that his resistance, and
even his death, was an act of love. He fought for the sanctity of life. He
gave, even to those who did not join him, another narrative. His defiance
condemned his executioners.
"Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole
influence, Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience after going to jail for
refusing to pay his taxes during the Mexican-American War. A minority is
powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then;
but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is
to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not
hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills
this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to
pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.
Those who recognize the injustice of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a
war with Iran, who concede that these wars are not only a violation of
international law but under the post-Nuremberg laws are defined as criminal
wars of aggression, yet do nothing, have forfeited their rights as citizens. By
allowing the status quo to go unchallenged they become agents of injustice. To
do nothing is to do something. They practice a faux morality. They vent against
war on the Internet or among themselves but do not resist. They take refuge in
the conception of themselves as moderates. They stand on what they insist is
the middle ground without realizing that the middle ground has shifted under
us, that the old paradigm of left and right, liberal and conservative, is
meaningless in a world where, to quote Immanuel Kant, those in power have
embraced a radical evil.
"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed
with the white moderate, King wrote from another era as he sat inside a
Birmingham jail. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the
Negros great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White
Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more
devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the
absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who
constantly says: I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree
with your methods of direct action; who paternalistically believes he can set
the timetable for another mans freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of
time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a more convenient
season. Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating
than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm
acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
This lukewarm acceptance, this failure to act, is the worst form of moral
cowardice. It cripples and destroys us. When Dante enters the city of woes in
the Inferno he hears the cries of those whose lives earned neither honor nor
bad fame, those rejected by heaven and hell, those who dedicated their lives
solely to the pursuit of happiness. These are all the good people, the ones
who never made a fuss, who filled their lives with vain and empty pursuits,
harmless no doubt, to amuse themselves, who never took a stand for anything,
never risked anything, who went along. They never looked too hard at their
lives, never felt the need, never wanted to look.
We face a crisis. Our democratic institutions are being dismantled. We are
headed for a state of perpetual war. We are paralyzed by fear. We will be
stripped, if we do not resist, of our few remaining rights. To resist, while
there is still time, is not only the highest form of spirituality but the
highest form of patriotism. It is, if you care about what is worth protecting
in this country, a moral imperative. There are hundreds of thousands who have
died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This number would be dwarfed by a war
with Iran, which could ignite a regional inferno in the Middle East. Not a lot
is being asked of us. Compare our potential sacrifices with what is being
inflicted on and demanded of those trapped in the violence in Iraq, Afghanistan
and soon, perhaps, Iran. Courage, as Aristotle wrote, is the highest of human
virtues because without it we are unlikely to practice any other virtue. Once
we find courage we find freedom.
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