Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

“We are all conscripts in one sense or another,” observed Susan Sontag in a speech reprinted as the foreword to the collection of testimonies from refuseniks that Peretz Kidron had given to me. “For all of us, it is hard to break ranks; to incur the disapproval, the censure, the violence of an offended majority with a different idea of loyalty.” Yet, Sontag went on to note, “resistance has no value in itself.” A Mormon could resist the ban on polygamy; a racist, laws prohibiting segregation. “Appeal to the existence of a higher law that authorizes us to defy the laws of the state can be used to justify criminal transgression as well as the noblest struggle for justice,” argued Sontag. “It is the content of the resistance that determines its merit, its moral necessity.”