Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality, and Leadership in an Age of Terror

by David James Duncan and Wendell Berry

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0913098620
• ISBN13: 9780913098622
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Orion Society
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Another Stunning Book in the Orion Series after 9/11

I was most moved by David James Duncan's essay in this book although I am always a fan of Wendell Berry's wisdom. The grief and outrage in Duncan's words were palpable. He is a fiction writer who makes up characters and places them in worlds that make sense. The real world today does not make sense and is filled with fictions that are really lies. His essay begins before the war in Iraq begins and there is a postscript written in April of 2003. Here is an excerpt of that postscript. "Yet on February 15th of this year, hundreds of millions of people demonstrated against this war in 600 cities worldwide.......Six hundred cities. Hundreds of nations. Hundreds of millions of people. Yet these marchers earned from George W. Bush the smirking remark, 'I don't listen to focus groups.'.... The DU (depleted uranium) to which our sons and daughters and all Iraq and Afghanistan is being exposed is murderous, though our palantir (Tolkien-Lord of the Rings) refuses to deem it so. And the greatest peace march in world history was not a 'focus group,' though our palantir showed the president deeming it so. Even despite television, an enormous global movement has been born out of love for the Earth and all life, and loathing for the empowered few's continued abuses against Earth and life. February 11, 2003 let us witness this. I refuse to let the palantir erase it."

A Brave, Independent Voice

Wendell Berry is one of those rare, brave voices speaking today, one who enrages both Democrats and Republicans because he doesn't cheerlead for either of them or tow their party lines. He does regard himself as conservative, however, in the true, traditional American sense of the term-- not in the current "Neo-Conservative"/imperialist abuse of the term. Socialist-leaning Democrats and Imperialist-leaning Republicans need to read him, and this book.

Wendell Berry Hits a Home Run!

This is the book that includes Berry's famous New York Times statement, "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America," that has quickly become one of the most important pieces of expository writing in American civil discourse. The Orion Society, which printed the statement in the NYT and has also published Berry's powerful In The Presence of Fear in book form, is to be congratulated for making this essay available so quickly in book form. The companion essay by David James Duncan is extraordinary in its own right. Uncompromising, passionate, and altogether wise!