Dissenter

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 09:57:09 +0100

By the way, this is what the powerful – and their sycophants – always fail to understand: no genuine dissident is happy about dissenting. You dissent because you see injustice, crime, corruption and needless death being wrought by the power structures of your own society. You dissent because so many lies have been forced down your throat, and you just want to know the truth, as far as it can be known, you just want to speak the truth, whatever it may be. You dissent because of the reality that you see. And this is a painful thing; it's like watching a family member go bad, like learning your own father is a killer, that your mother is thief. No one wants to believe evil of their own country, their own society; but sometimes the very ideals that you were given by your society – a commitment to justice, to truth, the belief in the inherent worth and moral agency of every individual human being – compels you to confront the reality of the crimes and corruption of the leaders and institutions of that same society.

It isn't fun; there's no pleasure in it. Especially if, with Dostoevsky, you believe that "each is responsible for all," that you yourself are implicated in every failure of humanity. Bob Dylan captured the essence of this kind of dissent well when he sang of the great iconoclast, Lenny Bruce:

He fought a war on a battlefield

Where every victory hurts.

Chris Floyd

Curiouser and Curiouser! on dissent

Dissenter