Schieffer Destroys Snowden: ‘I Don’t Remember Martin Luther King Jr. Or Rosa Parks Hiding In China’

[tomg]

254. I appreciate the point you are

making about Thoreau, but there is - I would claim - currently a difference. I was a CO and a court case. Although I won ( and it really was - or seemed to me at the time - touch and go), I was always working under the presumption of a certain level of justice within the system. That is, the penalties were clear. When I see, not that apparent whistleblowers ( and others and not simply Bradley Manning - there are those from the Ploughshares Movement such as Sister Megan Rice) are being prosecuted, but the ways in and the extent to and the purposes for which they are being prosecuted and the apparent open-endedness of the charges, I don't know if we can necessarily presume the same level of justice any longer in those types of cases.

I could be wrong, but for classic Civil Disobedience to work in a truly effective manner in what purports to be a democracy ( to whatever level), there is an implicit contract between the government and the cd and, by extension, all citizens. The cd acknowledges the right of the government as a democracy to create laws and, in willfully opposing the law also deliberately accepts the known (or relatively known) penalties. As much as the cd acts to reveal (or resist or bear witness or block - whatever) what it is that they feel is unjust, they do so openly in order to bring about a change to the law. The government, though, has to view the exacting of the penalty as the rightful consequence, while at the same time recognizing the right of the governed to change such laws. In other words, such actions lead to the opening up of the conversation ( kind of hard to have a conversation if you don't know ) which could evolve into change. So the actual consequence - or potential for the consequence - is willingly accepted as part of the contract and to serve the good of the democratic process.

In a non-democratic system or one moving toward that position ( no, I don't equate the US with Nazi Germany or East Germany, North Korea or wherever) I would posit that the role of the cd is quite different. There it is to reveal/resist/ whatever ( bearing witness seems out) and to do so without deliberately taking on the consequences because there is no correlation between the consequences and a notion of justice (regardless of whether the law, in fact, is in itself unjust). In other words, the implicit contract between the government and the cd (and by extension the people) does not exist. The purpose of the government/cd relationship is not to open the conversation but to shut it down. The purpose of the consequence is to strengthen the unjust law, not to lead to its interrogation.

I don't know where we are in this country. I like to think that if I was going for a CO today, I would stay and face the consequences in the event that I lost my case ( I believe that we only know what we are going to do in such cases when we actually face the choice), and those kinds of acts of conscience still occur and those acts of conscience still have an impact because of the visible acceptance of the consequences. Were I a whistleblower who had information that struck to the core of the corporate/informational/surveillance state, I like to think I would reveal it. If I did, though, I would book fast and hide deep. Staying and "facing the consequences" in the legal sense would be the furthest thing from my mind because they would serve no conversational or reformative purpose.