Finally, the new cold war may be more perilous because, also unlike during its forty-year predecessor, there is no effective American opposition—not in the administration, Congress, establishment media, universities, think tanks, or in society. In this regard, we need to understand our plight. We—opponents of the US policies that have contributed so woefully to the current crisis—are few in number, without influential supporters and unorganized. We have no access to the Obama administration, virtually none to Congress, which is a bipartisan bastion of cold war politics, very little to the mainstream media. We do have access to important alternative media, but they are not considered authoritative, or even essential, inside the Beltway. In my long lifetime, I do not recall such a failure of American democratic discourse in such a time of crisis. Indeed, some people who privately share our concerns—again, in Congress, the media, universities and think tanks—do not speak out at all. For whatever reason—concern about being stigmatized, about their career, personal disposition—they are silent. But in our democracy, where the cost of dissent is relatively little, silence is no longer a patriotic option. Finally, in connection with our struggle for a wiser American policy, I have come to another conclusion. Most of us were taught that moderation in thought and speech is always the best principle. But in a fateful crisis such as the one now confronting us, moderation for its own sake is no virtue. It becomes conformism, and conformism becomes complicity. And so, we patriotic heretics remain mostly alone and often defamed. The most optimistic perspective I can offer is to recall that positive change in history frequently began as heresy. And to quote the personal testimony of Mikhail Gorbachev, who once said of his struggle for change inside the even more rigidly orthodox Soviet nomenklatura: Everything new in philosophy begins as heresy and in politics as the opinion of a minority.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 23:07:03 +0000