Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  Those who do not carve out spaces separate from the state and its systems of power, those who cannot find room to become autonomous, or who do not “live in truth,” inevitably become compromised. Kasrils understood this during the Sharpeville Massacre. By refusing to act, he was part of the system of oppression.

  Movements that call on followers to “live in truth” do not always succeed. They failed in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, triggering armed insurgencies and blood-drenched civil wars. They have failed so far in Iran, the Israeli-occupied territories, and Syria. China has a movement modeled after Havel’s Charter 77—which was formed in 1977 to pressure the Czech government to abide by human rights guarantees enshrined in the Constitution and honor international human rights accords that the Communist government had signed—called Charter 08. But the Chinese opposition to the state has been effectively suppressed, even though its principal author, Liu Xiaobo—currently serving an eleven-year prison term for “incitement of subversion of state power”15—was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.16

  Power elites who stubbornly refuse to heed popular will and resort to harsher and harsher forms of state control provoke counterviolence. The first Palestinian uprising, which lasted from 1987 to 1992, saw crowds of demonstrators throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, but it was largely a nonviolent movement. The second uprising, or intifada, which erupted in 2000 and endured for five years, included armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. And the clashes during the summer of 2014 saw Hamas launching rockets into Israel from Gaza and carrying out armed assaults in Israeli territory via tunnels it had constructed. History is dotted with brutal fratricides spawned by calcified and repressive regimes that ignored the legitimate grievances of their citizens and continued to visit injustices upon them—or in the case of Israel, upon the people it occupies and whose peaceful protests it crushes.

  A resistance movement’s most powerful asset, however, is that it articulates a fundamental truth. As this truth is understood by the mainstream—“the 99 percent”—it gathers a force that jeopardizes the credibility of ruling elites. If the resistance movement is effectively severed from the mainstream—which is the primary goal of the counterinsurgency effort by the Department of Homeland Security, city police departments, and the FBI—it is crippled and easily contained. Other, more militant groups may rise and even flourish, but if a mass movement is to retain its hold over the majority, it has to fight within self-imposed limitations of nonviolence.

  “We would not have a movement if violence or property damage were used from the outset,” Kevin Zeese, one of the first activists to call for an Occupy movement, told me. “People are not drawn to violent movement[s]. Such tactics will shrink rather than expand our base of support. Property damage justifies police violence to many Americans. There is a wide range of diversity of tactics within a nonviolent strategy. Disciplined nonviolence is often more difficult because anger and emotion lead people to want to strike back at the police when they are violent, but disciplined nonviolence is the tactic that is most effective against the violence of the state.”

  The organizer Lisa Fithian is one of the authors of a concise argument for nonviolence, “An Open Letter to the Occupy Movement.” The essay points out that without agreements that enshrine nonviolence, “the young [are privileged] over the old, the loud voices over the soft, the fast over the slow, the able-bodied over those with disabilities, the citizen over the immigrant, white folks over people of color, those who can do damage and flee the scene over those who are left to face the consequences.”17

  Of the slogan used by the Black Bloc anarchists, Fithian and her coauthors write: “ ‘Diversity of tactics’ becomes an easy way to avoid wrestling with questions of strategy and accountability. It lets us off the hook from doing the hard work of debating our positions and coming to agreements about how we want to act together. It becomes a code for ‘anything goes,’ and makes it impossible for our movements to hold anyone accountable for their actions.

  “The Occupy movement includes people from a broad diversity of backgrounds, life experiences and political philosophies,” the article goes on. “Some of us want to reform the system and some of us want to tear it down and replace it with something better. Our one great point of agreement is our call for transparency and accountability. We stand against the corrupt institutions that broker power behind closed doors. We call to account the financial manipulators that have bilked billions out of the poor and the middle classes.

  “Just as we call for accountability and transparency, we ourselves must be accountable and transparent,” the authors write. “Some tactics are incompatible with those goals, even if in other situations they might be useful, honorable or appropriate. We can’t be transparent behind masks. We can’t be accountable for actions we run away from. We can’t maintain the security culture necessary for planning and carrying out attacks on property and also maintain the openness that can continue to invite in a true diversity of new people. We can’t make alliances with groups from impacted communities, such as immigrants, if we can’t make agreements about what tactics we will employ in any given action.”18

  By the 1980s, Mandela and the ANC leadership had recognized that as the struggle against apartheid evolved, it was the strikes and boycotts, along with the organizing work by nonviolent groups such as the United Democratic Front (UDF), the ANC’s political wing, that were the best instruments for crippling the apartheid regime. The ANC’s tiny rebel bands were increasingly ineffectual. South Africa heavily patrolled its borders and stymied most cross-border infiltrations and attacks. Armed attacks frightened white liberals—who were natural allies in the anti-apartheid movement—and were used by the apartheid regime to justify state violence. It was the growing use of “noncooperation” by the black majority that brought the economic engines of the country to a halt.

  The tactic of nonviolent protest also garnered support from the international community, which eventually imposed sanctions. If the ANC had invested all its energy in an armed movement rather than mass mobilization, it would have never triumphed. Mandela, although he never renounced violence, understood by this time that the movement had become a civil insurrection rather than an armed insurrection. And it was this transformation—and his ability as a leader to recognize and respect the transformation—that allowed the movement to triumph.

  Mandela was open about the inner moral struggle that accompanied his foray into violence and then his retreat from violence. In an excerpt from a 1979 letter to his former wife Winnie, included in his last book, Conversations with Myself, he wrote:

  Habits die hard and they leave their unmistakable marks, the invisible scars that are engraved in our bones and that flow in our blood, that do havoc to the principal actors beyond repair.… Such scars portray people as they are and bring out into the full glare of public scrutiny the embarrassing contradictions in which individuals live out their lives.

  We are told that a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying to be clean. One may be a villain for three-quarters of his life and be canonized because he lived a holy life for the remaining quarter of that life.

  In real life we deal, not with gods, but with ordinary humans like ourselves: men and women who are full of contradictions, who are stable and fickle, strong and weak, famous and infamous, people in whose bloodstream the muckworm battles daily with potent pesticides.19

  As societies unravel, as desperation becomes worldwide, it may happen that neither nonviolence nor violence will do very much to alter our impending self-destruction. Violence, in moments when we face near certain annihilation, can become a final affirmation of human dignity. But by then the game is over.

  Hanna Krall’s book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Edelman, who was twenty-three years old when he helped
lead the uprising, refused to hold up his actions as more moral than the actions of those who walked with their children to the gas chambers. After all, he said, by the time of the uprising he and the other resistance fighters knew that death was for most of them inevitable. In the apocalypse of the Warsaw Ghetto, armed resistance was morally justified, as even Edelman pointed out, but it was not the only choice.

  The uprising, started by mostly young Jews, lasted three weeks. They formed the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), or Jewish Fighting Combat Organization. The uprising ended when the Germans burned and razed the ghetto. Edelman escaped through the sewers and was carried away from the ghetto on a stretcher by members of the underground posing as members of the Polish Red Cross. A sign reading TYPHUS was placed on his body. German soldiers’ fear of contracting typhus ensured his easy passage through checkpoints. One of the women carrying the stretcher, Alina Margolis, later became Edelman’s wife. In the 1980s, during part of the war in El Salvador, Margolis, a pediatrician, lived in my house in San Salvador. She was working in a refugee camp for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

  She and Edelman were socialists. They did not support the Zionist leadership’s decision during World War II to negotiate with the Nazis so Jews could leave Europe for Palestine. Edelman and Margolis were committed to building societies where Jews could remain in Europe. They sought to foster a solidarity and common cause with all anti-Nazi forces, rather than retreating into the exclusive Zionist call for a Jewish state. They believed that capitalism was the problem. Edelman and Margolis, horrified by the slaughter and mass displacement of Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948, denounced Israel’s occupation. They defended the right of Palestinian people to resist that occupation, even through violence. They saw in the Palestinian struggle their own fight against German occupation during the war.

  Poland’s Jewish population of 3 million was largely obliterated in mass executions and concentration camps. This population comprised half of all the Jews murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. But Edelman, who witnessed two-thirds of the Warsaw ghetto population being taken away without resistance in cattle cars to the extermination camps, had little time for those who criticized these families for walking meekly to slaughter. He saw how starvation had broken the will of those around him. He saved his venom for those on the Jewish councils and the Jewish police, who knew about the mass exterminations and nevertheless did the Nazis’ bidding and herded their fellow Jews into the cattle cars. Starvation drove thousands of families into the hands of the Nazis who passed out oblong, brown loaves of rye bread to those who boarded the trains, trains that took them, unknowingly, to the Nazi death camp Treblinka.20

  Death, in moments of extremity, was about retaining one’s dignity.

  “To die in a gas chamber is by no means worse than to die in battle.… The only undignified death is when one attempts to survive at the expense of somebody else,” Edelman told Krall. Being deported was “infinitely more difficult than to go out shooting. After all, it is much easier to die firing—for us it was much easier to die than it was for someone who first boarded a train car, then rode the train, then dug a hole, then undressed naked.”21

  To be totally alone, even for those who faced certain death, was to be drained of purpose and meaning. There was a ferocious struggle to cling to life.

  One would [secrete] oneself somewhere with the other person—in a bed, in a basement, anywhere—and until the next action one was not alone anymore. One person had had his mother taken away, somebody else’s father had been shot and killed, or a sister taken away in a shipment. So if someone, somehow, by some miracle escaped and was still alive, he had to stick to some other living human being. People were drawn to one another as never before, as never in normal life. During the last liquidation action they would run to the Jewish Council in search of a rabbi or anybody who could marry them, and then they would go to the Umschlagplatz [where Jews were forced to gather for transportation to the death camps] as a married couple.22

  He described a friend he called “Adam” who had graduated before the war from military college and who took part in the September 1939 fight against the German forces that invaded Poland. “He was famous for his courage,” Edelman told Krall. “For many years he was a real idol of mine.” One day the two men were walking down Leszno Street in the ghetto, and “all of a sudden some SS [men] started shooting.” He went on:

  The crowd scrambled away desperately. And so did he.

  You know, I had never before suspected that he could be afraid of anything. And there he was, my idol, running away.

  Because he was used to always having a weapon by his side: in the military college, later in the defense of Warsaw in September, and in Modlin. The others had weapons, but he had a weapon, too, so therefore he could be brave. But when it happened that the others were firing their arms and he couldn’t shoot, he became another man.

  It all actually happened without a single word, [from] one day to the next: he simply quit all activity. And when the first meeting of the command group was about to be held, he was useless for participating in it. So I went instead.

  He [had] a girlfriend, Ania. One day, they took her to Pawiak Prison—she managed to get out later—but the day they took her, he broke down completely. He came to see us, leaned his hands on the table, and started telling us that we were all lost, that they would slaughter us all, and that since we were young we should escape to the forest and join the partisans instead of attempting to form an underground here in the city.

  Nobody interrupted him.

  After he’d left, somebody said: “It’s because they have taken her away. He has no reason to live anymore. Now he will get killed.”23

  The tragedy of the ghetto, of violence and counterviolence, extended to the hated Jewish police, who collaborated with the Nazis to maintain control and hunt down the underground resistance. The underground assassinated Jacob Lejkin, a senior Jewish police officer who zealously helped the Nazis organize the deportations, in October 1942. But even Lejkin had a story. He had a child, born after seventeen years of marriage, and he hoped by joining the police to save the child’s life.24

  Edelman noted the collective self-delusion that prohibited the Jews in the ghetto—as it prohibits us—from facing their fate, even after it became clear that the transports were taking thousands daily to Treblinka. In 1942 the underground resistance sent a spy to follow the trains. He returned to the ghetto and reported that freight trains loaded with people entered Treblinka and returned empty. He noted that food supplies were never sent to the death camp. The spy’s account was written up in the underground ghetto newspaper, but as Edelman remarked, “nobody believed it.” “ ‘Have you gone insane?’ people would say when we were trying to convince them that they were not being taken to work,” Edelman remembered. “ ‘Would they be sending us to death with bread? So much bread would be wasted!’ ”25

  Edelman condemned Adam Czerniaków, the Jewish leader of the ghetto, for committing suicide by swallowing cyanide on July 23, 1942, the day after the mass deportation of the Jews to Treblinka began. Czerniaków, Edelman said, should have informed everyone in the ghetto of the deportations. He should have dissolved all public institutions, especially the Jewish police. “They would have believed him,” Edelman said. “But he had committed suicide. That wasn’t right: one should die with a bang. At that time this bang was most needed—one should die only after having called other people into the struggle.” Edelman went on to say that Czerniaków’s suicide was the “only thing we reproach him for.”

  “We?” Krall asked.

  “Me and my friends,” Edelman said. “The dead ones. We reproach him for having made his death his own private business. We were convinced that it was necessary to die [publicly], under the world’s eyes.”26

  Traditional concepts of right and wrong, Edelman pointed out, collapse in moments of extremity. Edelman spoke to Krall about a doctor in the ghetto hospital who poisoned
the sick children on her ward as the Germans entered the building. She saved children from the gas chamber. She became, to those who remained in the ghetto, “a hero.”

  “So what, then, in that world turned upside down, was heroism?” Krall asked. “Or honor? Or dignity? And where was God?”

  “God,” Edelman said, “was on the side of the persecutors. A malicious God.”27

  Edelman said that as a heart surgeon in Poland after the war, he felt that he was always battling against this malevolent deity who sought to extinguish life.

  God is trying to blow out the candle and I’m quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of His brief inattention. To keep the flame flickering, even if only for a little while longer than He would wish. It is important: He is not terribly just. It can also be very satisfying, because whenever something does work out, it means you have, after all, fooled Him.28

  Edelman came upon a crowd of people on Zelazna Street in Warsaw after the occupation but before the ghetto was established. The crowd was standing around a “simple wooden barrel with a Jew on top of it. He was old and short, and he had a long beard.” Edelman went on: