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When Fear Comes
By Chris Hedges
January 10,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Truth
Dig"
-
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 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. 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!”
Chris
Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, the Middle East,
Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than
50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science
Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News
and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign
correspondent for 15 years.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
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