Wages of Rebellion (35 page)
Read Wages of Rebellion Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
If completed—the House of Representatives passed a Senate bill that authorized construction of the northern leg of the pipeline in February 2015—the 485-mile southern leg, from Cushing, Oklahoma, to Nederland, Texas, would slice through major waterways that include the Neches, Red, Angelina, and Sabine Rivers as well as the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which provides drinking water for some 10 million Texans.
The invasive extraction of tar sands and shale deposits and the deep-sea drilling in the Arctic, Alaska, and the Gulf of Mexico and on the Eastern Seaboard have been sold to the US public as a route to energy independence, a way to create tens of thousands of new jobs, and a boost to the sagging economy, but this is another corporate lie. The process of extracting shale oil through hydraulic fracking requires millions of gallons of chemically treated water that leaves behind poisoned aquifers and huge impoundment ponds of toxic waste. Extracting oil shale, or kerogen, for melting requires expending tremendous amounts of energy for a marginal return. It also involves vast open-pit mining operations and pumping underground that melts the oil with steam jets. Tar sand extraction, because it emits significantly more greenhouse gases than conventional oil drilling, will accelerate global warming.
Weis said that he saw the struggle to halt the Keystone XL pipeline as a symbolic crossroads for the country and the planet. One path leads, he said, toward decay, and the other toward renewal.
“There comes a time when we must make a stand for the future of our children, and for all life on Earth,” he said. “That time is here. That time is now.”
R
einhold Niebuhr wrote that those who defy the forces of injustice and repression are possessed by “a sublime madness” in the soul “which disregards immediate appearances and emphasizes profound and ultimate unities.” Niebuhr noted that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ”
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This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism is a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr wrote in
The New Republic
, “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.”
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The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Abraham Heschel notes, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.”
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Because he sees and faces an unpleasant reality, the prophet is “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected.”
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It is impossible to defy “radical evil”—a phrase originally coined by Immanuel Kant to describe those who surrender their freedom and morality to an extreme form of self-adulation and later adopted by Hannah Arendt to describe totalitarianism—without “sublime madness.” Sublime madness demands self-sacrifice and entails the very real possibility of death. Not that the rebel possessed of sublime madness wants to die, for the fight against radical evil is the ultimate affirmation of life. The rebel understands the terrible power of the forces arrayed against all rebels, and how far these forces, once threatened, will go to silence rebels, and yet is so possessed that he or she is unable to conform.
The rebel, dismissed as impractical and zealous, is chronically misunderstood. Those cursed with timidity, fear, or blindness and those who are slaves to opportunism call for moderation and patience. They distort the language of religion, spirituality, compromise, generosity, and compassion to justify cooperation with systems of power that are bent on our destruction. The rebel is deaf to these critiques. The rebel hears only his or her inner voice, which demands steadfast defiance.
Self-promotion, positions of influence, the adulation of the public, and the awards and prominent positions that come with bowing before authority mean nothing to the rebel, who understands that virtue is not rewarded. The rebel expects nothing and gets nothing. But for the rebel, to refuse to struggle, to refuse to rebel, is to commit spiritual and moral suicide.
“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Vaclav Havel said when he stood up to 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.
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The rebel, possessed of “sublime madness,” speaks words that resonate only with those who can see through the facade. The rebel functions as a prophet. He or she has what Leo Tolstoy described as the three characteristics of prophecy: “First, it is entirely opposed to the general ideas of the people in the midst of whom it is uttered; second, all who hear it feel its truth; and thirdly, above all, it urges men to realize what it foretells.”
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The message of the rebel is disturbing because of the consequences of the truth he or she speaks. To accept that Barack Obama is, as Cornel West says, “a black mascot for Wall Street” means having to challenge some frightening monoliths of power and give up the comfortable illusion that the Democratic Party or liberal institutions or a single elected official can be instruments for genuine reform. To accept that nearly all
forms of electronic communication are captured and stored by the government is to give up the illusion of freedom.
The rebel, by disseminating this truth, forces us to embrace a new radicalism. The rebel shows us that there is no hope for correction or reversal by appealing to power. The rebel makes it clear that it is only by overthrowing traditional systems of power that we can be liberated.
The denunciation of the rebel is a matter of self-preservation for the liberal class. For once the callous heart of the corporate state is exposed, so is the callous heart of its liberal apologists. And the rebel, who has few friends, is the constant target of the liberal establishment.
Socrates, for this reason, is reported by some ancient accounts to have stood mute when he was being tried for sedition and condemned to death. Plato, however, has Socrates defend himself in the
Apology
. Socrates’ judges could not grasp the inner compulsion—the sublime madness—that drove Socrates to risk his life for the truth. They failed to grasp the central Socratic paradox: that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. Socrates’ call for individuals to eschew the claims of society and the state on the citizen—like the rebellions of Assange, Abu-Jamal, Manning, and Snowden—was a form of civic heresy. His demand that we do what is right for its own sake—not for the sake of the
polis
or others, and not because we adhere to a particular moral or religious code—made no sense to those confined by law. Because he saw the political system in Athens as ignorant and morally bankrupt, he said that it was impossible for a good person to participate in the charade of justice it perpetrated. And for speaking this truth, for challenging the legitimacy of a decadent system, he was sentenced to die, charged with corrupting the morals of Athenian youth.
Socrates tells Callicles in the
Gorgias
in
The Dialogues of Plato
that, if he is put on trial, this is the reason why he will be bereft of an effective defense:
I’ll be judged like a doctor tried before a jury of children on charges brought by a pastry-cook. “Children, the defendant here has done many bad things to you. He corrupts the youngest among you by cutting and burning, he reduces them to perplexity by drying them out and stewing
them, prescribing the most bitter potions, compelling hunger and thirst; nor does he entertain you, as I do, with all kinds of delicious treats.” What do you think a doctor caught up in this evil could say? If he told the truth, if he said, “Children, I did do all these things, and for your health,” how great do you think the outcry from such judges would be? A pretty big one?
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Socrates goes on:
I know that if I am brought into court, it will be the same with me. I will not be able to tell them of the pleasure I provided, the things they consider kindness and benefits; and I envy neither those who provide them nor those for whom they are provided. If someone accuses me of corrupting the youth by reducing them to perplexity, or of abusing their elders with sharp and pointed speech, in public or private, I won’t be able to tell the truth, which is, “I say all these things justly, Gentlemen and Judges, and do so for your benefit.” Nor will I be able to say anything else. The result, no doubt, will be that I’ll take whatever comes.
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Martin Luther King Jr.’s life was marked by this Socratic paradox. Christian theology calls the Socratic defiance of radical evil “bearing the cross.” And Christian theology warns that all those who are successful in their defiance pay a bitter price. “When I took up the cross,” King said less than a year before he was killed, “I recognized its meaning.… The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately that you die on.”
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Or as King told a church congregation in Atlanta:
I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry. I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity. I choose to live for and with those who find themselves seeing life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign. This is the way I am going. If it means suffering a little bit, I’m going that way. If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way. If it means dying for them, I’m going that way, because I heard a voice saying, “Do something for others.”
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The moral life, celebrated only in the afterglow of history and often not celebrated at all, is lonely, frightening, and hard. The crowd condemns you. The state brands you a traitor. You struggle with your own fears and doubts. The words you speak are often not understood. And you are never certain if your words and actions, in the end, will make any difference. The rebel knows the odds. To defy radical evil does not mean to be irrational. It is to have a sober clarity about the power of evil and one’s insignificance and yet to rebel anyway. To face radical evil is to accept self-sacrifice.
Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab and John Milton’s Satan in
Paradise Lost
, like Marek Edelman, shared these qualities of “sublime madness.” They understood the strength of divine power, which they saw as malevolent, yet pitted themselves against it. It is those possessed by sublime madness who keep alive another way of being. W. H. Auden captured the solitude and even futility of such a life at the end of his poem “September 1, 1939.”
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere
,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust
,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair
,
Show an affirming flame
.
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I
traveled to the Swiss village of Begnins outside Geneva shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 to see Axel von dem Bussche. He was a former Wehrmacht major, holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for extreme battlefield bravery, three times wounded in
World War II, and one of the last surviving members of the inner circle of German army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
