Korean Job Discussion Forums

[R. S. Refugee]

"...By the way, this is what the powerful -- and their sycophants -- always fail to understand: no genuine dissident is happy about dissenting. You dissent because you see injustice, crime, corruption and needless death being wrought by the power structures of your own society. You dissent because so many lies have been forced down your throat, and you just want to know the truth, as far as it can be known, you just want to speak the truth, whatever it may be. You dissent because of the reality that you see. And this is a painful thing; it's like watching a family member go bad, like learning your own father is a killer, that your mother is thief. No one wants to believe evil of their own country, their own society; but sometimes the very ideals that you were given by your society -- a commitment to justice, to truth, the belief in the inherent worth and moral agency of every individual human being -- compels you to confront the reality of the crimes and corruption of the leaders and institutions of that same society.

It isn't fun; there's no pleasure in it. Especially if, with Dostoevsky, you believe that "each is responsible for all," that you yourself are implicated in every failure of humanity. Bob Dylan captured the essence of this kind of dissent well when he sang of the great iconoclast, Lenny Bruce:

He fought a war on a battlefield
Where every victory hurts.

So yes, it would be nice to be able to accept at face value the Pentagon's exonerating version of the incident at Ishaqi. (Relatively speaking, of course; that is to say, in the murderous context of the vast atrocity that is the Iraq war itself, it would be better to accept the Pentagon's assertion that the deaths of up these innocent people were simply the inevitable and unintended by-product of urban warfare, rather than the more grisly alternative. It would be good to have this slight mitigation of the general horror.) But a commitment to the truth -- and a refusal to succumb to historical amnesia -- prevents such an automatic acceptance."

from: http://smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=26366&mode=nested&order=0

[Hater Depot]

I would like to believe that that's true, but I don't. Some people dissent simply because it makes them feel morally superior.

[Gopher]

[deleted]

[R. S. Refugee]

[Octavius Hite]

We were right about Vietnam when we dissented against that and we are right about Iraq. These people who hate us and call us unamerican are people with too much pride to admit that they were wrong.