The Courage Of Individuals Is The Currency Of Our Freedom

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday November 12, 2008

ANNA FUNDER. Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall.

I saw Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya speak at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2006. She was direct and eloquent, and five months later, she was assassinated.

She answered questions about Russia and Chechnya, about Vladimir Putin's assumption of dictatorial power and the abandonment of the fledgling democracy of the '90s. She did not, like so many writers, indulge faux self-deprecation to draw the conversation back to herself.

At the end, a man said he admired her valour, but he wanted to know the personal price she paid for living under the threat of death.

"Traditionally in Russia we do not talk about such things," she said, before drawing breath. "Because the price does not matter. It does not matter compared to the cause you are trying to serve.

"But of course for many years my family hasn't been leading a normal life. I was arrested. I was poisoned. Or I had to go and negotiate during a terrorist act. When I was called to negotiate in that theatre event [the Nord-Ost siege in 2002] I got a phone call from my son who was almost screaming - he was saying, 'You are going to say no! We demand you say no!'

"My family probably suffers even more than I do."

What is worth more to a mother than protecting her children from fear, bereavement and danger to themselves?

An individual's dissent can be the price of freedom for the rest of us. The novelist Marilynne Robinson writes: "A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. A democracy relies on its exercise. I think we would be wise to learn to cherish it in one another."

Individual courage is necessary for democracy because, as Lord Acton famously put it, "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Absolute power is power unchecked by a free press (I mean that as shorthand for intellectual freedom), an independent judiciary, the separation of the executive government, the legislature and the law.

It is a cycle: absolute power is power unchecked by individuals who, themselves protected by the free press, the independent judiciary and the ballot box, can find the courage to say: "No - that is going too far."

Because a society is a changing, living organism, competing interests are always shifting in relation to each other, gaining or losing ground. But they do this in an environment that has laws as firm as Newton's: just as gravity makes things come down, power sucks more of itself to itself. It centralises control like a magnet pulling iron filings from every direction, like a black hole sucking matter into itself. In order to do this without protest, power must stifle dissent.

I have spent many years examining this phenomenon - the Iron Filing Manoeuvre and the courage of dissenters. I looked at it in the German Democratic Republic, where power was absolute, centralised and where speaking out against it was dangerous.

I spoke with people who disagreed profoundly with the need for other voices commenting on and limiting centralised power. These men were, unsurprisingly, members of the ruling party and its security service. They believed that they knew what the people wanted without asking them; in fact, they knew better.

They considered democratic freedoms a front for capitalists to buy access to power (control politicians) and to exploit workers. They were not entirely wrong. These are two weaknesses of democracies: think of Halliburton's links with the US Government; the ethanol producers or media tycoons in Australia; "Work Choices" and neoconservative disregard for a living wage generally.

But while the one-party dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic protected those in power in their uneasy seats, it came at a great human and economic cost, a cost that can be counted in lives ruined, people imprisoned and state bankruptcy.

The most extreme and recent example of the denial of our common humanity in this country - one which was condemned by several United Nations Human Rights bodies - was the treatment of asylum seekers. Recently, Tony Abbott, part of the government responsible for this treatment, tried to make the permanent damage done to asylum seekers and the tens of thousands of deaths in Iraq seem like small beer in contrast to the economic achievements of the Howard government. He is trying to shrug off moral responsibility for inhumanity.

The Howard government should and will always be judged on the record of what it did to people. And to a lesser extent, so will Australians, even those who did not and would never vote for that government.

When asked at the Sydney Writers' Festival, "Do Russians have the government they deserve?" Politkovskaya said, "I do agree, although" - she put a hand to her heart - "I do believe in my people."

This is the quandary. We need to believe in our better natures in order to find the courage to defend them. We need to remember what happened under the Howard government so that next time we might face down our fears, innate and manufactured. Without courage, as Aristotle had it, there is no other virtue.

Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall. This is an edited extract from tonight's Sydney PEN lecture at Sydney Grammar School. Elizabeth Farrelly's column runs on Thursdays.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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