Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
How do you define dissent? What sets it apart from simple anger?
It’s a good question. I think the difference is that dissent accepts that there are rival articulations of the world. To be a dissenter you have to understand the articulation of your enemy, of society around you, of the regime. You have to accept its reality and have your own articulate defence of something else, whatever that might be – of an alternative society, an alternative future, or yourself as you would like to be. It depends on recognising an intellectually crystalised reality outside you, and having an intellectually crystalised counter-reality inside you.
So it has to offer both a precise target and a precise alternative. And what of more vague dissent against circumstances that aren’t politically well defined, for instance the Occupy movement?
I’m forced here to make a distinction between dissent and dissidence. Of course, dissent can simply be an object noun. Clearly the Occupiers are dissenting, although it’s not entirely clear either what they’re dissenting from or what their alternative is. And I think those two go together – you can’t have an alternative unless you know precisely what you’re dissenting from. Whereas the Eastern European dissidents who I’m talking about here did, in general, stand for precise alternatives. It was insufficient for them just to say, “I’m standing apart”.
Although in the case of Václav Havel all he was really doing was to say, “We have the right to stand apart”. That was required in an awful lot of argumentation given the communist society that was around him. Dissidents recognise that you’re all on the same school bench but you have to sit somewhere else on that school bench, saying something different.
What else ties together the writers you have chosen to discuss?
The people whose books I’ve chosen lived in regimes which not only monopolised violence but threatened it in an everyday sense. And some of them suffered as a direct result of what they wrote. They were combating a Soviet regime which had killed literally millions of people, as they were aware of or sometimes had experience of. So as far as one can generalise the experience of Eastern European dissidents, they have had to use non-violent ways to deal with violent regimes. That non-violence was taken for granted, and in the end was successful.
Do you agree with the thesis that non-violent civil resistance is not only morally superior but simply the most effective method for regime change?
The statistics do suggest that non-violence is five times more likely to succeed within a political regime than armed resistance or terrorism. The aim is to establish within a society – indirectly of course – a standard of behaviour which would make it difficult for the regime to function. Whereas when you act violently, that’s also a kind of propaganda and a communication. Knocking down the World Trade Center was a horrible tragedy for thousands and frightened many millions of Americans. But it’s not sure exactly to whom it was addressed, and it was certainly seen by many millions of people to whom it was not addressed. One of the advantages of non-violent resistance is that you can be much more precise about what you’re trying to say.
Your first book is Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, which you describe as a prehistory of dissent.
Generally when people talk about Orwell in this context, they start with Animal Farm because it’s a retelling of Soviet history, or with 1984 because it’s an account of what a totalitarian society would look like, at a time when communism was spreading to Eastern Europe. The reason why I am so fond of Homage to Catalonia, and see it as an even more relevant precursor to dissent, is that in it you can see a man of the Left learning to make the distinction that breaks down the Left with a big L into lots of little lefts. He comes to understand what Soviet power actually is, and that it is qualitatively different to the other sorts of Spanish left, or to European left-wing intellectuals or Labour in England.
The difference is not just a matter of being on a different point of the spectrum. It is to do with the immediate violence of Soviet means which were visible to Orwell at that time and place. That’s the second thing which I find important about the book as a precursor to dissident literature. To the end of dissident literature, in the seventies and eighties, people defended themselves by making observations and elementary distinctions, preserving certain concepts, not allowing things to be vague. They defined themselves as individuals by their capacity to be specific about what was going on around them. And Orwell is wonderful at that. It is his creative gift.
He describes what is happening in Catalonia [during the Spanish Civil War] in such a way that we are able to see why he’s so upset about Soviet power. His argument is not one of category and concept but of irresistible observation, that builds itself up into facticity with a literary quality that is strong enough to contend with, if not defeat, ideological certainty. The dilemma that the dissidents had to face later on was that they had to build up a view of the world which was non-ideological, yet could somehow contend with and subvert ideological views of the world. Orwell did that on the basis of good observation and good prose.
Was it that fixed ideological dogma that repelled Orwell’s moral compass most?
My sense was that the ruthlessness of Soviet communist actions in Spain led him to an intuition about the wrongness of the total certainty of a worldview that could justify any action at any place and any time in service of the larger story. I think Orwell grasped that there was an almost arrogant coherence to Soviet activity when he saw the ruthlessness of Soviet behaviour, against a background where other people on the left were much less sure and confident, and were fighting for things that were much more immediate and palpable.
Timothy Snyder is professor of history at Yale University, with a focus on central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. He is the author of five books, most recently Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and helped Tony Judt to write Thinking the Twentieth Century, recently released in the UK. Snyder has written for publications including The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The New Republic
English transcript of Burmese dissident's address, to crowds awaiting her release from house arrest. Inspiring stuff. "The burden of these expectations is great and the responsibilities are immense"
Putting the Arab uprisings in historical perspective. Building new political orders is difficult, unpredictable, takes time. Look at what happened with the French and Russian revolutions, Iran, even America
Modern father of non-violent protest. Distrusted, disliked in his lifetime. Faddish, mystical. Hostile to industrialisation. Reacted against Western culture. Marginalised in recent decades, back in fashion with the Arab awakening
President Yanukovych really doesn't seem to understand that the European Union wants to help Ukraine, not to annexe it. And his confusion on that point may lead to Ukraine's reabsorption by Russia, which has the opposite aims
Breathtaking. Brilliant. Snyder asks history's most loaded question, and answers it with meticulous balance sheet. Stalin was first with ethnic killing campaigns; murdered more people than Hitler; but fewer than we used to think
