Dissident Quotes

The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

If you are creative, you must be dissident.

I'm one of the freaks, the faggots, the geeks, the savages, rogues, rebels, dissident devils, artists, martyrs, infidels ... do we sit still under attack? or do we start pushing back? never back up never back down & FIGHT.

But the true measure of a society’s freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists.

You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel: First, Competition; Secondly, Dissidence; Thirdly, Glory. The first, maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation. The first use Violence, to make themselves Masters of other men's persons, wives, children and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their Persons, or by reflexion in their Kindred, their Friends, their Nation, their Profession, or their Name.

When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self.

The very concept of "revolutionary violence" is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform. By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermination of whole villages, and the like.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.

Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. From you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge. ‘Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.

There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming. But more than that, birthing the kind of woman who can authentically say, 'My soul is my own,' and then embody it in her life, her spirituality, and her community is worth the risk and hardship.

I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country's wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people's lives." (from 'The Dance of the Dissident Daughter'.)

You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.

The truth is, in order to heal we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed...The story itself becomes a vessel that holds us up, that sustains, that allows us to order our jumbled experiences into meaning. As I told my stories of fear, awakening, struggle, and transformation and had them received, heard, and validated by other women, I found healing. I also needed to hear other women's stories in order to see and embrace my own. Sometimes another woman's story becomes a mirror that shows me a self I haven't seen before. When I listen to her tell it, her experience quickens and clarifies my own. Her questions rouse mine. Her conflicts illumine my conflicts. Her resolutions call forth my hope. Her strengths summon my strengths. All of this can happen even when our stories and our lives are very different.

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones. If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.

Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age... A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.

... you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.

--"And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the opppresso, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must--at that moment--become the center of the universe." "Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere." "As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs." ‎" We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

There is, simply, no way, to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have to hide anything – including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.

Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.

Whatever else you do, listen to your Deepest Self. Love Her and be true to Her, speak Her truth, always.

The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.

There is no doctrine called extremism. When tyrants speak of extremists, they just mean people who are not in the mainstream—as the tyrants themselves are defining that mainstream at that particular moment. Dissidents of the twentieth century, whether they were resisting fascism or communism, were called extremists. Modern authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, use laws on extremism to punish those who criticize their policies. In this way the notion of extremism comes to mean virtually everything except what is, in fact, extreme: tyranny.

The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.

Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.

Most social revolutions begin peaceably. Why would it be other-wise? Who would not prefer to assemble and demonstrate rather than engage in mortal combat against pitiless forces that enjoy every advantage in mobility and firepower? Revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, and El Salvador all began peacefully, with crowds of peasants and workers launching nonviolent protests only to be met with violent oppression from the authorities. Peaceful protest and reform are exactly what the people are denied by the ruling oligarchs. The dissidents who continue to fight back, who try to defend themselves from the oligarchs' repressive fury, are then called "violent revolutionaries" and "terrorists.

There are Tantrics who deliberately seek to do more active forms of renunciation, so transgression of social norms and breaking of taboo, and breaking of social taboos especially, is a form of renunciation.

The word for bank is the same, but the word for money changer is not, and while I have never learned the etymology behind this minor asymmetry I can imagine it represents centuries of cultural and ideological dissidence.

The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.

The second thing I wrote down that day was that exclusive male imagery of the Divine not only instilled an imbalance within human consciousness, it legitimized patriarchal power in the culture at large. Here alone is enough reason to recover the Divine Feminine, for there is a real and undeniable connection between the repression of the feminine in our deity and the repression of women.

They ordered the extermination of all minds they couldn't control

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.

If someone should ask me, 'What does the soul do?' I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts.

dissidence and controversy are what bring science forward. Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress.

And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances and smiled with the shyness of child brides. They said, Africa? We nodded yes. What part of Africa? We smiled. Is it that part where vultures wait for famished children to die? We smiled. Where the life expectancy is thirty-five years? We smiled? Is is there where dissidents shove AK-47s between women's legs? We smiled. Where people run about naked? We smiled. That part where they massacred each other? We smiled. Is it where the old president rigged the election and people were tortured and killed and a whole bunch of them put in prison and all, there where they are dying of cholera - oh my God, yes, we've seen your country; it's been on the news.

So I taught Sunday school and brought dishes to all manner of potlucks and tried to adjust the things I heard from the pulpit to my increasingly incongruent faith.

Thus in order to be a "radical" one must be open to the possibility that one's own core assumptions are misconceived.

They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do.

Nothing could be easier than disturbing a status quo instituted by others; the real work of the sinister current is to break the rules we rigidly establish for ourselves.” -Zeena Schreck for "Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity," University of Stockholm, Malin Fitger 2004

Don't be afraid of books, even the most dissident, seemingly 'immoral' ones. Culture is a sure bet in life, whether high, low, eclectic, pop, ancient or modern. And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit. I am not saying it is the ONLY tool, especially with all the new alternative - more visual, interactive and hasty - ways of knowledge, learning and growth. But how could I not be convinced of literature's power, when it has been my original emancipator?

I? This is the very root of all evil.

My Kindle is full of highly enjoyable, unequivocally filthy smut.

The truth hurts, sometimes, I suppose. But that doesn`t mean it shouldn`t be known.

He came to see, and I did too, that patriarchy wounds men also, that men have their own journeys to make in order to heal and differentiate themselves from it.

I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.

The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother? The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands.

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. 
They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the 
general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident 
thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals 
are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always 
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman 
and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse 
racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably 
true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of 
standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a 
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping 
away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes 
squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always 
anti-British.

No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. Initially, it is always the country’s dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune. And history shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.

I swear stupidity is contagious and as hard as I try, logic doesn't seem to be the cure.

Why didn’t I see this before? That my creative life is my deepest prayer. That I must pray it from my heart, from my soul.

It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

I asked myself, How many times have I denied my innermost wisdom and silenced this voice? How many times can a woman betray her sou before it gives up and ceases calling to her at all?

To seek Truth is automatically a calling for the innate dissident and the subversive; how many are willing to give up safety and security for the perilous life of the spiritual revolutionary? How many are willing to truly learn that their own cherished concepts are wrong? Striking provocative or mysterious poses in the safety of Internet [social media] is far easier than taking the risks involved in the hard work of genuine initiation.

If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred.

What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1-3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.

Lovely, quite girl, no trouble, no trouble at all. You wouldn't even know she was in the house. That is often the yarn twisted around women's wrists.

Indeed, love is everything.

He didn't understand how sadness came so easily to people. For him it was like a pile of rocks that had to be moved one at a time. Just thinking about it made him tired.

Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”9

And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father--the man holding the brush--and live up to his images of what a woman should be and do. We're rewarded when we do; life gets difficult when we don't.

I cried, sitting by her bed, and I told her the story of us. “It’s about the feed,” I said. “It’s about this meg normal guy, who doesn’t think about anything until one wacky day, when he meets a dissident with a heart of gold.” I said, “Set against the backdrop of America in its final days, it’s the high-spirited story of their love together, it’s laugh-out-loud funny, really heartwarming, and a visual feast.” I picked up her hand and held it to my lips. I whispered to her fingers. “Together, the two crazy kids grow, have madcap escapades, and learn an important lesson about love. They learn to resist the feed. Rated PG-13. For language,” I whispered, “and mild sexual situations.

Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself.

The core symbols we use for God represent what we take to be the highest good....These symbols or images shape our worldview, our ethical system, and our social practice--how we relate to one another. For instance, [Elizabeth A.] Johnson suggests that if a religion speaks about God as warrior, using militaristic language such as how "he crushes his enemies" and summoning people to become soldiers in God's army, then the people tend to become militaristic and aggressive. Likewise, if the key symbol of God is that of a male king (without any balancing feminine imagery), we become a culture that values and enthrones men and masculinity.

No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. Initially, it is always the country’s dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune.

A unifying factor between the different traditions and lineages of Tantra, is that it is feminine in nature. It acknowledges the feminine as the basis from which all the practices spring. Therefore, Tantra is by its nature, the understanding that all phenomenal existence, the universe, or cosmos, that we experience is feminine in nature.

Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies," two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped. In contrast, the consciousness of freedom is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect.

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

For always, always, we are waking up and then waking up some more.

Caroline scrambled off his lap, gazing down at the Persian rug. “Is this thing Scotchgarded?

Very often silence becomes the female drug of choice.

For years I'd written down my dreams, believing, as I still do, that one of the purest sources of knowledge about our lives comes from the symbols and images deep within.

Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctually reach out for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the Internet.

Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers' Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient's withdrawal from life. "The system has to be sound -- after all, it validates my professional status -- therefore the problem must be with you.

The most frustrating thing in the world, even more annoying than woke students who complain about every little microaggression, is a fundamentalist who is racist, homophobic & misogynistic, but is always crying about how unjust the world is. Most people in the Middle East are in fact not politically correct at all, do not want to be, and hate the guts of anyone who is.

And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: It seduces those – even Christians – who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him. Each of us thinks we wouldn’t be like that. But if we have accepted the lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble.

In this part of America, 'R's' are the dissidents of the alphabet. They won't be ruled. Behind closed doors, they conspire and print leaflets. They make love to many women. They smoke cigarettes in place of eating food. Then, in front of witnesses with no recourse to justice, they are pulled from their beds in the middle of the night. Some are imprisoned. Some silenced. Others go missing. A few reappear sealed up in the wall of another word if they are found at all. Thus, a thought that is valued is truly an 'idear.' Wanda comes out as Wonder or Wander and both fit her.

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming 'the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the belief that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes , which are indelible--this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, to believe that they are white. These people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white--Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish--and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, was not achieved through wine tasting and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

The legal stuff gets twisted too. The courts, instead of being fair judges, end up supporting this unfair takeover. It's like they're saying to the settlers, "Yep, go ahead, it's a court order, so technically you are not evil".

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want—to hear you erupting. You Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you—I want to hear you. . . . If we don’t tell our truth, who will? Ursula K. Le Guin

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward.

Zeena Schreck believes that the right-hand path and the left-hand path have traditionally had the same end goal; it is only the method that is different and the fact that adepts on the left-hand path seek liberation in this life. --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

But the more significant factor is that one can easily remain free of even the most intense political oppression simply by placing one’s faith and trust in institutions of authority. People who get themselves to be satisfied with the behavior of their institutions of power, or who at least largely acquiesce to the Plegitimacy of prevailing authority, are almost never subjected to any oppression, even in the worst of tyrannies. Why would they be? Oppression is designed to compel obedience and submission to authority. Those who voluntarily put themselves in that state – by believing that their institutions of authority are just and good and should be followed rather than subverted – render oppression redundant, unnecessary. Of course people who think and behave this way encounter no oppression. That’s their reward for good, submissive behavior. As Rosa Luxemburg put this: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” They are left alone by institutions of power because they comport with the desired behavior of complacency and obedience without further compulsion. But the fact that good, obedient citizens do not themselves perceive oppression does not mean that oppression does not exist. Whether a society is free is determined not by the treatment of its complacent, acquiescent citizens – such people are always unmolested by authority – but rather by the treatment of its dissidents and its marginalized minorities.

You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do. To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.

There are Tantrics who deliberately break taboos and social norms and then there are other Tantrics who, by means of their practices and the way that they practice, that to society in general, it may have the appearance of breaking social norms but in fact that is just the manifestation of the progress of their practice.

This is a hard question. But as women we have a right to ask the hard questions. The only way I have ever understood, broken free, emerged, healed, forgiven, flourished, and grown powerful is by asking the hardest questions and then living into the answers through opening up to my own terror and transmuting it into creativity. I have gotten nowhere by retreating into hand-me-down sureties or resisting the tensions that truth ignited.

I will take you down my own avenue of remembrance, which winds among the hazards and shadows of my single year as a plebe. I cannot come to this story in full voice. I want to speak for the boys who were violated by this school, the ones who left ashamed and broken and dishonored, who departed from the Institute with wounds and bitter grievances. I want also to speak for the triumphant boys who took everything the system could throw at them, endured every torment and excess, and survived the ordeal of the freshman year with a feeling of transformation and achievement that they never had felt before and would never know again with such clarity and elation. I will speak from my memory- my memory- a memory that is all refracting light slanting through prisms and dreams, a shifting, troubled riot of electrons charged with pain and wonder. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essentional fire that is poetry itself. But i will try to isolate that one lonely singer who gathered the fragments of my plebe year and set the screams to music. For many years, I have refused to listen as his obsessive voice narrated the malignant litany of crimes against my boyhood. We isolate those poets who cause us the greatest pain; we silence them in any way we can. I have never allowed this furious dissident the courtesy of my full attention. His poems are songs for the dead to me. Something dies in me every time I hear his low, courageous voice calling to me from the solitude of his exile. He has always known that someday I would have to listen to his story, that I would have to deal with the truth or falsity of his witness. He has always known that someday I must take full responsibility for his creation and that, in finally listening to him, I would be sounding the darkest fathoms of myself. I will write his stories now as he shouts them to me. I will listen to him and listen to myself. I will get it all down. Yet the laws of recall are subject to distortion and alienation. Memory is a trick, and I have lied so often to myself about my own role and the role of others that I am not sure I can recognize the truth about those days. But I have come to believe in the unconscious integrity of lies. I want to record even them. Somewhere in the immensity of the lie the truth gleams like the pure, light-glazed bones of an extinct angel. Hidden in the enormous falsity of my story is the truth for all of us who began at the Institute in 1963, and for all who survived to become her sons. I write my own truth, in my own time, in my own way, and take full responsibility for its mistakes and slanders. Even the lies are part of my truth. I return to the city of memory, to the city of exiled poets. I approach the one whose back is turned to me. He is frail and timorous and angry. His head is shaved and he fears the judgment of regiments. He will always be a victim, always a plebe. I tap him on the shoulder. "Begin," I command. "It was the beginning of 1963," he begins, and I know he will not stop until the story has ended.

But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. (“Letter To Stalin”)

[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do–that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing. Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens–especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints–are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views.

One of the biggest dangers on the left-hand path, according to Zeena, is that the initiate often adheres to the need of ‘maintaining his personality’, even when consciousness expands beyond every known border. The left-hand path requires, [...] that certain aspects of the self dies, something which she believes to be elucidated in the tantric death symbolism. --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

In Demons of the Flesh, Zeena describes how Shiva and Shakti are actually ‘two sides of the same deity’. The goal of the initiate on the left-hand path is to become ‘this bisexual twin godhead’ and activate a state of perceptual sexual ecstasy within one's own consciousness. Zeena points out that a corresponding symbolism is found in the western hermeticism in the idea of ‘the inner androgyne.’ --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

I was also part of a post-Vietnam generation that had learned to question its own government and saw how - from the rise of McCarthyism to support for South Africa's apartheid regime - Cold War thinking had often led America to betray its ideals. This awareness didn't stop me from believing we should contain the spread of Marxist totalitarianism. But it made me wary of the notion that good resided only on our side and bad on theirs, or that a people who'd produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky were inherently different from us. Instead, the evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased. None of that was unique to Soviets or Communisists, I thought; it was true for all of us. The brave struggle of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain felt of a piece with, rather than distinct from, the larger struggle for human dignity taking place elsewhere in the world - including America.

Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic party protected racial segregation and stymied all antilynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.

Zeena believes that the breaking of taboos creates access to blocked energy that is let loose in a forceful way. The left-hand path is about consciously breaking with a ‘sleepwalker orthodoxy’ to be able to act as a fully awaken and conscious individual. In her book, George Orwell (1984) is quoted: “Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” At the same time she notes that the left-hand path is the ‘way of action’. It is not about intellectual contemplation, or worse, just reading about action.' About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger from: Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity, University of Stockholm, 2004

The hypothesis advanced by the propaganda model, excluded from debate as unthinkable, is that in dealing with the American wars in Indochina, the media were "unmindful", but highly "patriotic" in the special and misleading sense that they kept -- and keep -- closely to the perspective of official Washington and the closely related corporate elite, in conformity to the general "journalistic-literary-political culture" from which "the left" (meaning dissident opinion that questions jingoist assumptions) is virtually excluded. The propaganda model predicts that this should be generally true not only of the choice of topics covered and the way they are covered, but also, and far more crucially, of the general background of the presuppositions within which the issues are framed and the news presented. Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense, may adopt an "adversarial stance" with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative conception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious and often individual effort will be difficult to sustain or apply elsewhere, an extremely important matter for those who are truly concerned with democracy at home and "the influence of democracy abroad," in the real sense of these words.