How to be a Dissident… or Not

At the start of the Nevada Desert Experience’s Sacred Peace Walk, a 60-mile journey each Spring from Las Vegas to the nuclear test site, witnessing against drone warfare, for indigenous land rights as well as against nuclear weapons, one of the walkers passed out copies of How to be a Dissident by Gal Beckerman to some of us for our comments in advance of a podcast interview with the author.

I was hoping to find how Beckerman’s advice might apply to being a dissident in the present circumstances where we find ourselves but was disappointed. We read how some people dissented in the time of the Mexican American war, in the Warsaw Ghetto, in Stalin’s gulag, under Putin’s oligarchy, in German occupied Netherlands, Mao’s China, in ancient Greece, under apartheid in South Africa, in communist Czechoslovakia, in 1960 Birmingham, Alabama, how one might resist being drafted into Hitler’s army. Except for citing Edward Snowden’s heroic exposure of invasive technology and the Amish folks’ avoidance of telephones, Beckerman’s book offers little on How to be a Dissident in the United States in 2026, in the country and in the year it is published. It is as though for Beckerman, dissent on earth died with Alexei Navalny in a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle in 2024.

“Few people seem to be contemplating where to draw a line,” Beckerman says. It is unclear if he is choosing to dismiss his many contemporaries who have moved beyond contemplation to actively crossing those lines or if he is simply unaware of them. Of course, there are far too few dissidents in the United States today than the times demand, but their number and their influence are not entirely negligible.

The epilogue, “How We Should Behave” would seem to be an answer to the title of the book’s introduction, posed as a question, “How Should We Behave?” The use of punctuation here is misleading. The introduction and the chapters of How to be a Dissident are comprised largely of stories of courageous dissenters of the past that might inspire and inform potential dissenters here and now, but Beckerman ends his book with more questions than answers and those questions seem to be largely hypothetical ones. Of all the urgent issues facing us here and now, he mentions just a few, the violence surrounding mass deportations in American cities, the mounting war crimes of Israel and “the daily incursion of AI into more and more realms in my life.”

Beckerman acknowledges that some unnamed activists are standing with targeted immigrants at risk to themselves and he asks himself, “Should I join them?” he asks. “Should I risk it myself?” “Should I send my children?” While commending the active dissent of Etty Hillesum in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and that of Diogenes in 336 BC Corinth, Beckerman seems unsure if opposing ICE in Minnesota in 2026 is such a good idea.

“It tore me apart,” Beckerman says about the “unrelenting gruesome war that took little regard for the lives of civilians” perpetrated by Israel, where his parents were born and “a country whose people and future I care about.” Again, “How We Should Behave” in the present tense is only addressed with questions, not answers. He asks himself, “How should I respond? By disavowing my family, including my young cousin who is a soldier? By joining a protest, even if it means standing next to someone calling for an end to Israel itself?” Such questions hang in the air, as if they are unanswerable in themselves, the many heroic examples from the past catalogued in How to be a Dissident notwithstanding.

Why so little about dissent in the present tense? It is difficult to imagine how a staff writer for The Atlantic, living in Brooklyn, hadn’t access to a slew of real, live dissidents of all kinds that he could have talked to for his book. I imagine that he had the resources, too, had he chose, to have travelled to Minnesota or Portland this past winter to at least interview the anti-ICE dissidents there, if not join them. Last Fall, he might have taken research for his book overseas and interviewed members of the group Rabbis for Human Rights, even if he might not have joined them protecting Palestinian farmers from marauding settlers during the olive harvest. As other journalists have in the past, he would have been welcome to join the half dozen or so other New Yorkers on our sacred peace walk in Nevada this Spring, to talk about dissent with dissenters, perhaps even to crossing the line with us, the line that he says “few people seem to be contemplating” and facing arrest. Just as many Catholics are with our saints, I wonder if Beckerman thinks it is just safer to admire dissidents who are dead than to talk and act with living ones.

In the chapters between “How Should We Behave?” and “How We Should Behave,” the author provides advice based on heroic stories gleaned from history.

“Be Pessimistic” is one chapter of Beckerman’s instruction on how to be a dissident. While his historical references leave no room for optimism, they do not embrace pessimism so clearly as he suggests. Concepts like pessimism and optimism are equally unhelpful to the dissident, equally incapacitating. We might more constructively speak of hope and despair.

In 1959, the dissident American Catholic monk Thomas Merton wrote a letter to the dissident Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, “the only thing that is to be regretted without qualification is for a person to adapt perfectly to totalitarian society. Then he is indeed beyond hope. Hence, we should all be sick in some way. We should all feel near to despair in some sense because this semi-despair is the normal form taken by hope in a time like ours. Hope without any sensible or tangible evidence on which to rest. Hope in spite of the sickness that fills us. Hope married to a firm refusal to accept any palliatives or anything that cheats hope by pretending to relieve apparent despair. And I would add, that for you especially hope must mean acceptance of limitations and imperfections and the deceitfulness of a nature that has been wounded and cheated of love and of security: this too we all feel and suffer. Thus, we cannot enjoy the luxury of a hope based on our own integrity, our own honesty, our own purity of heart.”

Albert Camus’ novels The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and The Rebel (1951) are employed to support Beckerman’s endorsement of pessimism. “The rebel is not a revolutionary,” Beckerman says about Camus, “believing that he can replace one reality with another, one political order with another.” Camus’ 1949 essay, Neither Victims nor Executioners, however, accepts the possibility of such change and he speaks not of pessimism but of realism, positively dazzling realism, as a necessary attribute for the dissident: “Let us suppose that certain individuals resolve that they will consistently oppose to power the force of example; to authority, exhortation; to insult, friendly reasoning; to trickery, simple honor. Let us suppose they refuse all the advantages of present-day society and accept only the duties and obligations which bind them to other men. Let us suppose they devote themselves to orienting education, the press and public opinion toward the principles outlined here. Then I say that such men would be acting not as Utopians but as honest realists. They would be preparing the future and at the same time knocking down a few of the walls which imprison us today. If realism be the art of taking into account both the present and the future, of gaining the most while sacrificing the least, then who can fail to see the positively dazzling realism of such behavior?”

“Be Alone” is another piece of advice offered to one who would be a dissident, “face the discomfort and fear.” Good advice, but only so far as it goes.

Writing from federal prison in 1969, where he was remanded for his part in destroying 1A draft records during the war in Vietnam, Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wrote, “‘Of course, let us have the peace,’ we cry, ‘but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.’ And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men and women should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.”

In his dissent from the same war two years earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached from Riverside Church in New York, “Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”

But, King continued, “we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us” and he recognized, as did Berrigan, that ultimately dissent fills that deep need and dissent is the way out of that darkness, perhaps the only way out and the only answer to the loneliness, isolation and despair found in quiet compliance with a totalitarian and repressive society. It is only in dissent that many dissidents find true companionship, true community.

The co-founder of the Catholic Worker and dissident Dorothy Day wrote in her postscript to her appropriately named memoir, The Long Loneliness (1952) that “the most significant thing is community… We are not alone anymore. But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire. We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore.”

The singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen was often prophetic but not so much of a dissident as he sometimes thought he should be. In his song, In My Secret Life, he confessed,

I smile when I’m angry
I cheat and I lie
I do what I have to do to get by
But I know what is wrong
And I know what is right
And I’d die for the truth
In my secret life.

And of the price paid for silence on the things that matter,

I bite my lip
I buy what I’m told
From the latest hit to the wisdom of old
But I’m always alone
And my heart is like ice
And it’s crowded and cold
In my secret life

Without elaboration, Beckerman alludes to things he says “I’ve done in these circumstances.” If detailed, he says, they “might seem extreme to some and wholly inadequate to others.” However praiseworthy his actions (we may never know) or how prudent his silence around them, though, a dissident is one who acts publicly and pays the price and so they are irrelevant to the subject of his book. Intended or not, Beckerman suggests that dissent is a choice that one might opt for or not. Moreover, he seems to hold that it is not only possible but even advisable, sometimes, to quietly sit things out, assuming that the storm will leave those who choose not to be involved in peace. Dissidents know this is not true.

Dissident Sophie Scholl with her comrades of the White Rose resistance to Nazism, knew that their little band of university students in Munich was not going to bring down the Third Reich by itself, but she also knew that she would find no safety in her silence. Before her execution in 1943, 21-year-old Sophie wrote:

The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

Gal Beckerman can be commended for collecting the stories of creative and courageous dissent from around the globe, from ancient times to as recently as 2024. He is correct, too, in encouraging careful discernment of the role each of us must play if we are to save the planet. How to be a Dissident may be the most vital question anyone can ask today. Beckerman’s book, unfortunately, is no call to action. It does not take into account the urgency of our time and seems to be more about whether to be a dissident at all, than about what decisive action to take.

Daniel Ellsberg, whose dissent did not stop with exposing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, before his death in 2023, advised any person who imagines that they might do something heroic at any time in their life to do it quickly- time is running out. As Dr. King preached at Riverside Church, “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action.”

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