Rising Up and Rising Down

William T Vollmann
Abridged

In short, satyagraha is correct only if the sacrifice is for something, and only if the oppressor will eventually be moved to cease his aggression should the sacrifice become of sufficient magnitude. If one or both of these conditions remains unmet, then counterviolence is justified.

That was the beginning, their pact to be one family. Gandhi prayed and fasted to keep it so. he failed; mass loving-kindness perishes; but maybe violence, wrong, rivalry and envy can be sublimated into emulation. hence this Spartan definition of the best government: The one in which the largest number of citizens are willing to compete with each other in excellence and without civil discord. But a child stole another child's pretty rock, as he would have done before people came together. A woman liked somebody else's husband. I ask you, Plato: Who is too rich or too poor for that to happen? And you, Spartans: Tell me how she can leave one man for another without civil discord? --A family feared, hence hated, another family's God. A man kept pretty cattle, and he knew that other men wanted him to die so that they could get them. Meanwhile, Julius Caesar's bodyguard was growing ominously large. It was time for government. Unfortunately, it is always time for government.

Martin Luther in the Heidelberg Theses of 1518 had warned that too vivid an apprehension of the beautiful things would give a moral actor confidence--which by the Lutheran definition must be unwarranted--in his own moral capacity. The works of men are all the more deadly when they are done without fear, he wrote, and with pure and evil assurance. (A modern restatement: When it comes to revolutionaries, trust only the sad ones. The enthusiastic ones are the oppressors of tomorrow.)

Carry out your program, please, not your ideology.

The gloomy conclusion begins to appear that whenever violence defines my relationship to you, I must be an apple and you an orange, and only dust upon our peeled carcasses can make us one; that because the stakes can be so high (literally, life and death), violent confrontations tend to be predicated on insoluble disagreement.

My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth--cold-blooded enough, you will say, but life cannot evade death. Have you ever shot a cow in the head, slit her throat, cut her hooves off, skinned her, gutted her and quartered her so that you and others can eat? Have you ever been the doctor who must decide which one of ten patients gets the life-support machine? Surely it is better to have a rational and consistent means of doing these things than to do them trying not to think of what one is doing.--Suppose, then, that the calculus can prove that one ought never to kill. --Well and good. We are surely better off for seeing it proved.

As a factory worker, my productive power becomes potentially unlimited. New machines decrease the amount of time it takes me to make something, thereby allowing--that is, requiring--me to make more such items than before, for the same fixed wage. It is as if I suddenly found myself digging not one ditch for my lord but ten. I may expend no more effort than I did in completing a single ditch, and so in a certain sense opaque to Marxism am not exploited at all (or at least I'm not more exploited than I was), but thanks to capital, embodied in the new machine, the gap between my wage and my lord's profit has increased by an order of magnitude. The distinction between absolute and relative poverty suddenly becomes much more important. It is no longer what I make but I myself who am for sale.

Were they just cynical loyalists? Maybe not. Arkhipenkov's persecutors must have been quite sure of themselves, one would think. So they were. As the secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, a fellow who is known to have worked in a grain confiscation brigade noted about new people 'raised up' by the Party: 'It's hard to find the right words to express this confidence, but I'll try. It's a feeling of power, might, and serenity that comes from the realization that the mighty Soviet people, a hundred seventy million strong, is behind you.' Joan of Arc, and those who burned her, could have said the same thing, substituting God for the Soviet people. They too were sure that they were right. And perhaps the secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers was right, too.

Again and above all, no clay-eater can be blamed for wanting to do something about his hunger.

But what about states' rights? asks Lincoln derisively in his speech. Well, if the citizens of Nebraska can invoke those to keep slaves, then it is certainly within their rights to go to Africa to buy slaves, and we've already made doing that a capital crime! --Not that anybody's yet been hanged for it...--For Lincoln the struggle between state and federal authority can be resolved in only one way; we never hear him argue that the federal government ought not to have the power to regulate slave trading. (Oddly enough, however, when the issue of granting statehood to Utah comes up, he says that there is nothing in the Constitution which allows the government to prohibit polygamy there, which is precisely what the government ultimately does.) Trotsky and Tolstoy speak of natural law; and there does seem to be a natural law that authority enlarges itself indefinitely, whether by frenzied growth in revolution or by incumbency's subtler increase. Given the rights of the self, it seems to me that authority possesses the right to self-aggrandizement only through imminence or incumbency. Most of the time, it grows without right.

An Aztec war hymn runs in part: 'I go forth, I go forth about to destroy, I, Yoatzin; my soul is in the cerulean water.'
Meanwhile Cortes addresses his men at the very beginning of the expedition to New Spain: 'We are engaging in a just and good war which will bring us fame.' Doubtless he prays for his good success every day when he goes to Mass. 'He was devout and given to praying,' recalls his secretary; 'he knew many prayers and psalms by heart.'

Metaphors ought to be left outside both courtroom and battlefield; metaphors and political action (to say nothing of metaphors and violence) make a dangerous mix.

Overreliance on context might lure me into the false assertion that the functionary of an evil regime must be evil--or, more vulgarly still, that the 'objective' nature of that context allows for only a certain moral decision. Trotsky tells us that he was prepared from childhood to be a revolutionary, simply as a result of seeing around him so much injustice. But his parents, who saw the same things, did not become revolutionaries. Context does not determine; it only contextualizes.

The most illuminating way to perceive the shoddiness of your own ideals is to witness someone else practicing them.

Lincoln's victory in the American Civil War was justified certainly by the abolition of slavery it brought about, and arguably by the fact that the South attacked first. But one result of his victory, and the main point for which is was fought--federal control--was not justified.

The letter itself is much shorter than its signature pages. The terrible year of 1992 has dwindled away from these people now; they live on or they have died. This letter accordingly means nothing. Their names mean nothing today as they meant nothing before the evil men and women whose policies locked them fast to the front line of a besieged city. Let them stand in for all the other people whose names have meant nothing to war criminals.

Most of the people I've helped are either in jail or dead, he said.

The same comment/quote made of Europe Central applies to Rising Up and Rising Down as well: How could you not know what goes on in this world?

Did you know that there are parts of Kingston, Jamaica (Trenchtown, Rema, Tivoli) are almost wartorn? Did you know that in 1999 Kosovo residents had to run everywhere for fear of being a sniper's target? Did you know that in 1995 the UN pulled out of Somalia (see page A24 of your local newspaper)? Did you know that Khmer Rouge executed people with pickaxes? I guess the exhaustive list of violence committed by humans would be a violence itself, since so few could be faced with such a condemnation. So I'll stop woefully short.

I am a sheltered person. I have made feeble efforts not to be, but they have amounted to very little. I would not want to unfairly condemn my generation, class, or nation, but I feel that those who partake of these three with me, also partake of my shelter.

How can we not know what goes on in this world?

We may have an obligation to ensure that we do know, at least a little of what goes on in this world, but how can we dare to know what goes on in this world? Who could bear that burden? Both valid questions that together leave me right here.

Vollmann makes a courageous attempt to face the violence in the world and he speaks from experience--true he doesn't speak from the experience of a boy in Rema or a woman in Kosovo, but he did his best to share some of this with them, without mocking the blessings of peace he has been given. You wonder by the end how he isn't dead--if not from all the danger he has placed himself in, than from the sheer horror of what he's researched, witnessed, and been told. My only answer is that even he, a man without faith, still has hope. If Vollmann can have hope, no Christian ever has the excuse of giving hope up.

It's sadly funny that Vollmann had to abridge his seven-volume opus into this so much condensed edition in order for it to get read; it's sad that his seven volume edition probably anoints many a university library shelf like a bottle of forgotten, disliked perfume sitting in the back of a bathroom drawer. But at least in its abridgment it reaches a few more voices with its potency, even if there is less of it.

If you read this post and read Rising Up and Rising Down, it will probably make you feel like a thief, at least a little, for the gifts and blessings and peace you most likely have. Count yourself lucky, if you do feel like such a one, for 'This day you will be with me in paradise'.