On 1/9/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
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> Truthdig
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> When Fear Comes
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/when_fear_comes_20170108/
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> 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
>
>
>
>
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First, a salute to Meryl Streep for her heroic act of chastising the
decadent behavior of the incoming regime. Here's hoping that her
example of speaking out and taking a stand, is infectious. Fear and
misdirection are the two top weapons of Empires. I believe that it is
vital that we read again and again the quote in Chris Hedges below
article, by Solzhenitsyn:
"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!"
Carl Jarvis
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