Look at the current state of the world and you can either be enraged or completely overwhelmed. Neither response, says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chis Hedges, engenders an effective revolutionary. You have to embrace a sublime madness to make real change.
That’s the premise of his new book, Wages Of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative Of Revolt ($32, Knopf Canada, rating: NNNN).
Don’t be put off by the introduction. It’s 20 pages of dense reading citing complex works that further the argument that the commitment to rebellion need not be rational.
Get past it and Hedges delivers a lively, wholly accessible treatise that focuses on individuals – lawyers, activists and others – to demonstrate what goes into the resolve to fight for change.
But first he shows why revolt is required in the first place. He lays on a stream of disturbing facts and figures showing the breadth of the income gap, how corporations are destroying the planet, the extent to which technology is trampling on people’s privacy rights and why America’s prisons are packed – mostly with black people.
It’s with the activists he’s chosen to profile that he makes his argument for what he calls “sublime madness,” the trait required for a revolutionary to succeed.
One of his profiles is of American attorney Lynne Stewart, who by doing her due diligence to defend her client against terrorism charges, was sentenced with abetting terrorism herself.
Another is of Canada’s Wiebo Ludwig, who bombed Big Oil sites when all legal attempts to stop the drilling of dangerous sour gas wells near his community had failed.
In a journalistic coup, Hedges also got access to Axel von dem Bussche before he died in 1993, the only one left among the conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1943.
These people, and other resisters described here, reject core values of their society, the belief in which becomes a matter of doctrine. Many of them, like Hedges himself, are people of faith, smashing the stereotype of believers as uniformly reactionary.
To be sure, much of the data here is American, but given that Parliament has just passed Bill C-51, to give just one example, Hedges is absolutely relevant.
He comes across as a prophet on a mission. Heed his words.
I’ll be on interviewing Hedges tonight, 7 pm, at a sold-out event at the Toronto Reference Library. For a full report, visit nowtoronto.com tomorrow (Wednesday, May 13).
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
