Dissent: What's in it for You?
Ernest Partridge, Co-Editor
The Crisis Papers.
October 2, 2007
The Crisis Papers is
approaching its sixth year of internet publication. Our inaugural
appearance was on November 2, 2002, two days before the
Congressional election of that year.
In the five years that followed, my colleague Dr.
Bernard Weiner and I
have written more
than three hundred original essays for the progressive internet,
originating at The
Crisis Papers; these
in addition to dozens more that we wrote before we launched The
Crisis Papers. Almost
all of these essays have been severely critical of the Bush
Administration, the Neo Conservatives, and the radical right.
Along with numerous progressive bloggers, we do this with no
expectation or realization of financial compensation, but rather out
of passionate concern about the political and economic catastrophe
that has befallen our country since the appointment of George Bush
to the Presidency by the Supreme Court. We, the progressive
bloggers, are also motivated by a shared realization that with the
honorable exception of such individuals as Bill Moyers, Keith
Olbermann, and Jon Stewart, the internet is virtually all that
remains of an opposition media, the “mainstream” media having
reduced itself to little more than the propaganda organ of the
Republican Party and its corporate sponsors.
When we launched The Crisis Papers, we believed that we could do so
without fear of retaliation by the government. After all, we assumed
that because we were American citizens, we were protected by our
Constitution and Bill of Rights. No longer. With the passage and
subsequent “refinements” of The Patriot Act, with the abolition of habeas
corpus, with the Military Commissions Act, with recent executive
orders unchallenged by the Congress, we have lost these protections.
“You are either with us or you are with the terrorists,” said the
President. We are clearly on record as not being “with” the
Busheviks. Ergo, what?
Are we terrorists? The answer lies, not with the law or the courts,
but with the whim of the President. The new decrees so stipulate.
Speaking for myself, I have no illusions: this dissenter is a very
small minnow in a very large lake. I am protected by my personal
obscurity and insignificance. If there is a roundup of dissenters, I
expect that the awaiting Brown & Root detention camps will be filled
to near capacity with important players of the opposition before the
thought-police come a-knocking at my door. But this much we already
know: After eight-hundred years in Anglo-American jurisprudence and
explicit specification in the US Constitution, habeas
corpus is a goner,
and the Congress is unwilling to restore it. American citizens can
be held and tortured for several years without charge, trial or
access to counsel – witness the
fate of Jose Padilla, whose incarceration explicitly violated
five of the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights, plus the
Fourteenth Amendment. Countless additional prisoners of the state
are now sharing Padilla’s fate in Guantánamo and elsewhere. (Note:
The Bill of Rights applies, not to “citizens,” but to “persons.”)
Dissenters in the mainstream media have been silenced, and several
have lost their careers. Witness Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield,
Bill Maher, and Dan Rather. Retaliation against dissent has extended
to family members: cf. Valerie Plame Wilson.
Yes, I am free to write and dissent. But only because I am too
insignificant for the regime to notice, much less be concerned
about, my complaints. As for the “bigger fish,” they persist at the
sufferance of the regime and the corporate media: for the moment, it
would be politically inconvenient to silence them. But the means are
in place to do so, should the regime so order. Not long ago,
dissenters were protected by the law, the courts and the
Constitution. No longer. And that should concern all of us.
And so I am asked by friends, relatives, and strangers who visit our
website, “Why are you doing this? Why are you writing and publishing
your constant stream of criticism of George Bush, his regime, the
neo-conservatives and the radical right? What’s in it for you,
Ernest Partridge?”
If these were simply personal questions, then my response would be a
personal indulgence and unworthy of your further attention. But
these are, by implication, general questions which might be as
readily addressed to hundreds of other volunteer citizen bloggers:
to Will Pitt, Glenn Greenwald, Mark Crispin Miller, Michael Green,
David Swanson, Robert Parry, Paul Craig Roberts, and so many more.
First of all, a very practical answer: it’s too late to back out
now. For all of us dissenting bloggers, our “thought-crimes” are on
the record. So there is no choice but to carry on until either
silenced by the regime, or until that regime is overthrown and our
Constitutional rights and rule of law are restored.
However, the question, “what’s in it for you?” is fundamentally
misguided, for it presupposes that the bloggers’ dissent is
selfishly motivated. It is the sort of question that a disciple of
Ayn Rand would readily understand. Not so a patriot. One might just
as well ask “what’s in it for you?” to the signers of the
Declaration of Independence, to Mohandas Gandhi, to Martin Luther
King.
As Ken Burns’ magnificent series “The War” reminds us, when millions
of young men enlisted to fight that war, those volunteers did not
ask themselves: “what’s in it for me?” When the US government
imposed rationing and other burdens on the civilians, they did not
ask “what’s in it for me?”
After December 7, 1941, the nation united to defend itself against
an external enemy – an enemy that threatened our nation’s commonly
held and cherished political and moral ideals: freedom, autonomy,
personal rights, mutual respect, tolerance, and rule by consent of
the governed.
Today, the progressive bloggers are calling upon the nation to
defend itself against another common threat, but this time the
threat is from within. This enemy of our republic seized power
through the connivance of a corrupt Supreme Court and has maintained
that power through lies and electoral fraud. Because this enemy has
the support of the mainstream media, much of the public has accepted
the official line and, equally important, has not been informed of
the crimes of this regime or of the official encroachment upon the
citizens’ Constitutional rights and upon the rule of law.
Instead, the Bushevik regime and its compliant media have directed
public attention abroad, to a mythical “Axis of Evil” and “Islamo-Fascism,”
in an attempt to revive through these chimeras the public perception
of external threat that united “the greatest generation” in the war
against the “Axis Powers.”
And for awhile, it worked spectacularly well. However, as I have
noted before, propaganda is a sprinter and reality is a
long-distance runner, and it appears that reality is catching up at
last.
If our democracy is to be restored, the truth of the internal threat
must continue to seep into the public consciousness. The Bushevik
regime and its Republican party will resist, as will the mainstream
media. To our profound sorrow, we have discovered that the
Democratic party has been intimidated into insignificance.
And so if the facts of the right-wing, Bushevik betrayal of our
civic compact are to be heard, it is up to the few remaining
independent and progressive voices in the corporate media to report
them, as long as they are permitted to be heard, also the few
remaining independent and progressive publications, such as The
Nation, The New York Review, and The
New Yorker.
Above all, there remains the internet, which repeats and amplifies
the voices of the progressive broadcast and print media – Moyers,
Olbermann, Krugman, Hersh, etc. Added to this are the volunteered
insights and opinions of the progressive bloggers.
And what’s in it for them – for us? Nothing more or less than the
satisfaction of performing our urgent and compelling moral and civic
duties.
At his January, 1961 inauguration, John F. Kennedy told the nation,
“Ask not, ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you
can do for your country." At the outset of his war of choice against
Iraq, George Bush advised his fellow citizens to “go out and shop.”
“It’s my job” to worry about the war, he
told us in July, 2004. “It’s your job to go about your
business.”
For the authentic patriot, when the nation’s fundamental civic and
moral principles are in mortal danger, the essential question is
not, “why should I get involved with this struggle?” That essential
question is “How can I not be involved?” It is a rhetorical question
that Thomas Paine answered directly: in times such as this, that
“try men’s souls... [the] summer soldier and the sunshine patriot
will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country.”
Instead, it is “the business” of the authentic patriot to dissent
and to resist, until government of, by and for the people is
restored.
Fortunately, at this crucial moment in our history, the internet
provides us with a powerful instrument of resistance.
Copyright 2007 by Ernest Partridge
Ernest Partridge's Internet Publications
Conscience of a Progressive: A
book in progress.
Partridge's Scholarly
Publications. (The
Online Gadfly)
Dr. Ernest Partridge is a
consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics
and Public Policy. He has taught Philosophy at the University of
California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the
website, "The
Online Gadfly" and
co-edits the progressive website,"The
Crisis Papers". His e-mail is: gadfly@igc.org .
