Pindar on the courage to dissent

By Aussiegirl

One of our most faithful and intelligent commenters here on UT is Pindar, who just posted this wonderful comment on the post about Phyllis Chesler. It is simply too thorough and relevant to be relegated to the comments section, so I have reprinted it here for all to enjoy. Thanks, Pindar, for this excellent addition to the topic at hand.

Pindar said:

I agree that "there are none so blind as those who will not see", the important word here being "will": a deliberate, willful closing-off of the reasoning part of the brain in order to preserve the lie that gives some sort of comforting structure and identity. This article comes from FrontPage magazine.com--for me a must-read website every day, as is Ultima Thule--and over the last few years they have published several dozen symposia, hosted by Jamie Glazov, which deal with many interesting and vital topics, among them the Islamic threat to the West. On October 21, 2005, he brought together for a symposium--highly relevant, as it turns out, to this article--six former leftists, among them Chesler and Tammy Bruce, who had seen the light of truth and left the lemmings--as did David Horowitz himself, the founder of FrontPage magazine.com. Here is the link to this extremely interesting and pertinent symposium: Leaving the Political Faith.

While I'm on the subject of these symposia, there's another one, also pertinent to this discussion, that Jamie Glazov hosted on August 6, 2002, shortly after the death of Alexander Ginzburg, the former leading Soviet dissident. He invited three other former Soviet dissidents together to discuss Ginzburg's life and what he represented. This symposium must be read to understand what the face of a real enemy looks like, and the seemingly impossible efforts necessary to combat it. Here is an exchange from the symposium that illustrates this:

Question #9: When you look at the Soviet regime and you see the most monstrous system that ever existed in the history of man, it becomes fascinating and inspiring to know that there were brave souls, like Alexander Ginzburg and yourselves, who, knowing that they risked torture, death and life-imprisonment, still stood up alone to confront despotism. Personally, I have always been in awe of these heroes, wishing that I had the courage to be who they were (and are), and hoping that I too would have done what they did if I had been in their shoes. But talk is cheap, and I do not know, if I were really put into that hell, if I would have or could have been a dissident. What makes a dissident?

[Yuri] Yarim-Agaev: You cannot become a dissident and remain true to your position if you are prepared to make only some specific sacrifices. You have to be ready for the labor camps and/or death. There could be many other tests and temptations, which you cannot foresee from the outset. Some of them can be harder for you to endure personally than those which you envisioned about in the beginning. It may sound strange, but many of us experienced some more difficult tests in the free West or modern Russia than in the communist Soviet Union. I can say it about Ginzburg too. That explains why some dissidents who stood firm to the KGB and Soviet persecutions gave in to temptations of freer and easier times. Only a profound and deep philosophy, as well as strong principles, can help you to stay the course. Ginzburg had them and did not go astray.

Here is the link to this symposium: Alexander Ginzburg and the Resistance to Totalitarian Evil, Then and Now. Having read this very important symposium, each of us can then ponder the question, as Jamie Glazov did, of whether or not we have it within us to become a dissident. Perhaps we are lucky that fate has not chosen to make us confront this question, and we haven't had to spend a good part of our lives in jail, rather than doing fun things and living normal lives. Surely this problem is one of the eternal problems of human life, with no general solution for everyone--but we are lucky that such men and women exist--and have always existed.