Testify to the truth
Authoritarians fear dissidence
Being part of a religious minority is a good workout for the courage of your convictions. In France and Italy, majority Catholic countries where I’ve lived at some length, being Protestant is all it takes. A French pastor friend reminded me yesterday, in fact, of the need to be a “good protestant.” (I think the lower-case “p” is most fitting.)
He was speaking in part to what I’d call “our current crisis,” but not positing an obligation to protest. The obligation is, rather, to “testify.” In other words, to tell the truth openly as we see it, with courage and determination. Not being like Jeffrey Epstein is actually pretty easy for most people. (Or so I hope.) Telling our truth, on the other hand, can be a difficult test of character.
And costly. It certainly was for the former IRS employee Anne Applebaum recently profiled, who told the acting IRS commissioner she was resigning – 23 days short of eligibility for early retirement – rather than carry out an illegal Trump Administration order. Kathleen Walters: you are an example to us all.
Testifying to the truth reminds me of what Václav Havel – Czech author, dissident, coal shoveler, and president – referred to as “living in truth.” His 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” has been described as a “diatribe against conformity and fear and a call for autonomy, solidarity, and unpredictability.” By making gestures to prove their allegiance to a regime, people create ““a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual.” And those bridges are dismantled through acts of dissidence, of telling the truth.
So many gestures to prove allegiance these days. So many individuals’ excuses for the failures of the system. Supposedly expert commentators trotted out to assure us that the President far exceeds the comprehension of our feeble minds. Whether it is Iran, Ukraine, or Venezuela, we are told he is playing four-dimensional chess with incredible mastery. The truth is one of greed, manipulation, and self-interest, and it is important to testify to that truth.
Social media are filled with bridges of excuses justifying the savage killings of Americans in Minneapolis. Significantly, the regime turns acts of dissidence, simple expressions of disagreement with regime policies, into justifications for violent repression. In fact, authoritarians and aspiring authoritarians fear dissidence. As Havel put it in 1978: “A SPECTER is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’” In Adam Serwer’s eloquent words of a few days ago: “The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone.”
It is important that dissent haunt the corridors of power in Washington. That the morally depraved be reminded of the individual virtue that’s actually out there. So let us be good small-p “protestants,” testifying to truth. And accepting the risks that go with that. For what it’s worth, being burned at the stake, like Czech theologian and reformer Jan Hus in 1415, still seems unlikely.
