Read Wages of Rebellion Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Wages of Rebellion (26 page)
Thomas Paine is America’s single great revolutionary theorist. We have produced a slew of admirable anarchists (Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, and Noam Chomsky), and radical leaders have arisen out of oppressed groups (Sitting Bull, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Cornel West, and bell hooks). But we do not have a tradition of revolutionists. This makes Paine unique.
Paine’s brilliance as a writer—his essay
Common Sense
is one of the finest pieces of rhetorical writing in the English language—was matched by his understanding of British imperial power. No revolutionist can challenge power if he or she does not grasp how power works. Of Paine’s many contributions to the American Revolution, this understanding ranks as one of the most important.
Many American leaders, including Benjamin Franklin, were hoping to work out an accommodation with the British crown to keep America a British colony—just as many now believe they can work through traditional mechanisms of power, including electoral politics and the judicial system, to reform corporate power. Paine, partly because he did
not come to America from England until he was thirty-seven, understood that the British monarchy—not unlike our corporate state—had no interest in accommodation.
It became Paine’s job to explain to his American audience the reality of British power and what effective resistance to this power would entail. Paine knew that the British government, which wielded the global imperial power that America wields today, was blinded by its hubris and military prowess. It had lost the ability to listen and as a result had lost the ability to make rational choices—as the inhabitants of New York would discover when British warships and mercenary troops during the revolution mercilessly bombarded and occupied the city. The British foolishly believed that their superior military force alone would decide the conflict, the same mistake the United States made in Iraq and Afghanistan and earlier in Vietnam.
Paine created a new, revolutionary political vocabulary.
Common Sense, Rights of Man
, and
The Age of Reason
were the most widely read political tracts of the eighteenth century.
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Common Sense
went through twenty-five editions and reached hundreds of thousands of readers in 1776 alone.
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It was the first political essay in Enlightenment Europe to call for a separation between
“civil society”
and
“the state,”
terms that political philosophers as far back as Aristotle (
koinonìa politikè
) and Cicero (
societas civilis
) had considered interchangeable.
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Civil society, Paine argued in defiance, must always act as a counterweight against the state in a democracy. Power, he warned, even in a democracy, carries within it the seeds of tyranny.
Paine, as George Orwell and James Baldwin did later, used his pen as a weapon. He detested the flowery and ornate writing of his age, epitomized by academics and philosophers such as Edmund Burke, whose turgid prose he called “Bastilles of the word.”
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His lucid, crystallite writing was deeply feared by the monarchies in Europe, as well as the Jacobins in France, who imprisoned Paine and planned to execute him for denouncing the Reign of Terror. He fearlessly spoke undeniable truths. And he did so in a language that was accessible. He called his readers to act upon these truths. “My motive and object in all my political works, beginning with
Common Sense
,” Paine remembered in 1806, “… have
been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free.”
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Chronically short of money, Paine pressed his publishers to print cheap editions so the poor and working classes could afford them.
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And he famously donated the profits of
Common Sense
and his popular
Crisis
essays to help fund the revolutionary war effort.
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“Where liberty is, there is my country,” Benjamin Franklin once said to Paine. “Where liberty is not, there is my country,” Paine replied. For Paine, the role of a citizen extended beyond national borders. The fight of those living under any system of tyranny was his fight. “When it shall be said in any country in the world, ‘My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness—when these things can be said,” wrote Paine, “then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.”
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One of the most important keys to radical social change, as historian J.G.A. Pocock points out, is a change in the nature of language itself, in the emergence of both new words and new meanings for old words. “Language,” he wrote, “is both a product of history and possesses a history of its own.”
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The call for revolution advanced by Paine, like those from writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were issued in the new language of secular rationalism rather than the older language of religion. But Paine, unlike Rousseau, wrote in the everyday language of working people. Grounding his writing in their common experiences, he was the first political writer to extend debate beyond university halls, government office buildings, and elite clubs and salons to the streets and the taverns. Paine knew liberty was intimately connected with language. And he knew that those who seek to monopolize power always use inaccessible and specialized jargon to exclude the average citizen. Paine broke these chains.
Paine’s clarity will have to be replicated today. We too will have to form a new language. We will have to articulate our reality through the ideas of socialism rather than capitalism in an age of diminishing resources. And we will have to do this in a form that is accessible. Foner
cites Paine’s ability to reach the general population as one of his most significant achievements:
Paine was one of the creators of this secular language of revolution, a language in which timeless discontents, millennial aspirations and popular traditions were expressed in a strikingly new vocabulary. The very slogans and rallying cries we associate with the revolutions of the late eighteenth century come from Paine’s writings: the “rights of man,” the “age of reason,” the “age of revolution” and the “times that try men’s souls.” Paine helped to transform the meaning of the key words of political discourse. In
Common Sense
he was among the first writers to use “republic” in a positive rather than derogatory sense; in
The Rights of Man
he abandoned the old classical definition of “democracy,” as a state where each citizen participated directly in government, and created its far broader, far more favorable modern meaning. Even the word “revolution” was transformed in his writing, from a term derived from the motion of planets and implying a cyclical view of history to one signifying vast and irreversible social and political change.
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Paine also understood that despotic regimes—and here the corporate state serves as a contemporary example—make war on reason and rational thought. They circumscribe free speech and free assembly. They marginalize and silence critics. They seek to subjugate all institutions to despotism—or in our case, corporate power. They use propaganda to rob people of the language to describe their daily reality and discredit those who seek radical change. The goal is to render a population politically alienated. Those who live under despotic regimes, Paine noted, are denied the ability to communicate and discuss in a national forum their most basic concerns and grievances. And this suppression, Paine understood, has consequences. “Let men communicate their thoughts with freedom,” Paine’s attorney Thomas Erskine said, quoting Paine, in Paine’s 1792 trial in Britain for seditious libel, “and their indignation fly off like a fire spread on the surface; like gunpowder scattered, they kindle, they communicate; but the explosion is neither loud nor dangerous—keep them under restraint, it is subterranean fire, whose
agitation is unseen till it bursts into earthquake or volcano.”
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Finally, Paine understood that war is always the preferred activity of despotic states, for, as he would write in
The Rights of Man
, war is essentially “the art of conquering at home.”
Paine paid for his honesty. When he returned to England, where he wrote
The Rights of Man
, he was relentlessly persecuted by the state, as he would later be persecuted in France and in America upon his final return. John Keane, in his biography
Tom Paine: A Political Life
, describes some of what Paine endured as a radical in late-eighteenth-century England:
Government spies tailed him constantly on London’s streets, sending back a stream of reports to the Home Secretary’s office. Those parts of the press that functioned as government mouthpieces pelted him with abuse. “It is earnestly recommended to Mad Tom,” snarled the
Times
, “that he should embark for France, and there be naturalized into the regular confusion of democracy.” Broadsheets containing “intercepted correspondence from Satan to Citizen Paine” pictured him as a three-hearted, fire-breathing monster, named “Tom Stich.” Open letters, often identically worded but signed with different pen names, were circulated through taverns and alehouses. “Brother Weavers and Artificers,” thundered “a gentleman” to the inhabitants of Manchester and Salford, “Do not let us be humbugged by Mr. Paine, who tells us a great many Truths in his book, in order to shove off his Lies.” Dozens of sermons and satires directed at Paine were published, many of them written anonymously for commoners by upper-class foes masquerading as commoners.
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Paine’s power, like Orwell’s and Baldwin’s, lay in his refusal to be anyone’s propagandist. He told people, even people who supported him, what they often did not want to hear. He may have embraced the American Revolution, as he embraced the French Revolution, but he was a fierce abolitionist and a foe of the use of terror as a political tool, a stance for which he was eventually imprisoned in revolutionary France. He asked the American revolutionaries “with what consistency,
or decency,” they could “complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery.”
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He denounced in the National Convention in France—where he was one of two foreigners allowed to be elected and sit as a delegate—the calls in the chamber to execute the king, Louis XVI. “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression,” Paine said. “For if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
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Unchecked legislatures, he warned, could be as despotic as unchecked monarchs. His warning was prophetic.
On July 24, 1794, the revolutionary government ordered that Paine, held in the Luxembourg prison, be executed. The next morning a turnkey, walking down the corridor that held cells, chalked the doors of those to be taken to the guillotine the next morning. The turnkey chalked the number 4 on the inside of Paine’s cell door, which was left open during the day for ventilation. It was only when another turnkey later in the day closed the door to Paine’s cell that Paine and his cellmates were inadvertently spared. That evening the armed squad that came to collect the condemned passed by Paine’s door, the number 4 now facing the inside of the cell. They dragged out screaming prisoners in nearby cells, but left behind Paine, who was suffering from a high fever, and the others waiting breathless in his cell.
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Paine’s placidity and calm, even in the face of death, made him one of the most beloved prisoners in the Luxembourg. When George-Jacques Danton and his supporters were brought into the prison for execution, Paine called out to him. The other prisoners watched as the Luxembourg’s most renowned prisoner and “the giant of the Revolution” clasped hands. Danton told Paine: “That which you did for the happiness and liberty of your country, I tried in vain to do for mine.” Danton, after a moment, added: “I have been less fortunate.”
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A fellow prisoner described Paine’s countenance:
His cheerful philosophy under certain expectation of death, his sensibility of heart, his brilliant powers of conversation, and his sportive vein of wit rendered him a very general favourite with his companions of misfortune, who found a refuge from evil in the charms of society. He
was the confidant of the unhappy, the counselor of the perplexed; and to his sympathizing friendship many a devoted victim in the hour of death confided the last cares of humanity, and the last wishes of tenderness.
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Paine hated the pomp and arrogance of power and privilege. He retained throughout his life a fierce loyalty to the working class in which he was raised. “High sounding names like ‘
My Lord
,’ ” he wrote, “served only to ‘overawe the superstitious vulgar,’ and make them ‘admire in the great, the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves.’ ”
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He ridiculed the divine right of kings and popes. The British monarchy, which traced itself back seven centuries to William the Conqueror, had been founded, he wrote, by “a French bastard landing with armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives.”
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And he detested the superstition and power of religious dogma, equating Christian belief with Greek mythology. “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit,” he wrote. Paine posited that the self-professed virtuous people would smash the windows of the actual Christian God if God ever lived on earth.
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