Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges Read Free Book Online Page A

the uprising. The military handed out food to the impoverished peasants. It also detained scores of men. Many were tortured. Some were killed. In twelve days of heavy fighting, about two hundred people died. By February, the Zapatistas, who had hoped to ignite a nationwide revolution and who were reeling under the military assault, agreed to negotiate. Most had retreated into the surrounding jungle. The insurgency, Marcos said at the memorial for his assassinated comrade, had faced a fundamental existential choice at that point:
    Should we prepare those who come after us for the path of death?
    Should we develop more and better soldiers?
    Invest our efforts in improving our battered war machine?
    Simulate dialogues and a disposition toward peace while preparing new attacks?
    Kill or die as the only destiny?
    Or should we reconstruct the path of life, that which those from above had broken and continue breaking?
     … Should we have adorned with our blood the path that others have charted to Power, or should we have turned our heart and gazed toward who we are, toward those who are what we are—that is, the indigenous people, guardians of the earth and of memory?
    Nobody listened then, but in the first babblings that were our words we made note that our dilemma was not between negotiating and fighting, but between dying and living.
     … And we chose.
    And rather than dedicating ourselves to training guerrillas, soldiers, and squadrons, we developed education and health promoters, who went about building the foundations of autonomy that today amaze the world.
    Instead of constructing barracks, improving our weapons, and building walls and trenches, we built schools, hospitals and health centers; improving our living conditions.
    Instead of fighting for a place in the Parthenon of individualized deaths of those from below, we chose to construct life.
    All this in the midst of a war that was no less lethal because it was silent. 16
    The movement’s shift from violence to nonviolent civil disobedience—a shift that also took place within the African National Congress (ANC)—was evidenced during the memorial. Zapatista leaders said they knew the identities of the vigilantes who had carried out the attacks. But those in the crowd were cautioned not to seek vengeance against the killers, who, they were told, had been manipulated to murder in the service of the state. The focus had to remain on dismantling the system of global capitalism itself.
    As happened with the ANC half a world away, the shift from violence to nonviolence was what gave the Zapatistas their resiliency and strength. Marcos stressed this point:
    Small justice looks so much like revenge. Small justice is what distributes impunity; as it punishes one, it absolves others.
    What we want, what we fight for, does not end with finding Galeano’s murderers and seeing that they receive their punishment (make no mistake this is what will happen).
    The patient and obstinate search seeks truth, not the relief of resignation.
    True justice has to do with the buried
compañero
Galeano.
    Because we ask ourselves not what do we do with his death, but what do we do with his life. 17
    This transformation by the EZLN is one that is crucial to remember as we search for mechanisms to sever ourselves from the corporate state and build self-governing communities. The goal is not to destroy but to transform. And this is why violence is counterproductive. We too must work to create a radical shift in consciousness. We must, as the Zapatista slogan insisted, “Be a Zapatista wherever you are.” And this will take time, drawing larger and larger numbers of people into acts of civil disobedience. We too must work to make citizens aware of the mechanisms of power. An adherence to nonviolence will not save us from the violence of the state or from the state’s hired goons and vigilantes. But nonviolence makes conversion, even among our oppressors, possible. And it is conversion that