An act of dissidence
is eventually solitary. It’s the result of a choice taken in the solitude of a person’s
conscience. The same was the case with the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal
Khashoggi, who disappeared on 2 October after entering the Saudi consulate in
Istanbul to obtain documents for his marriage. Weeks later, Saudi authorities admitted
that the journalist - who had been close to the Saudi royal family for decades but
went into self-exile in the US following crackdown on dissident in Saudi Arabia
– was killed inside the consulate.
‘In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of
silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot,’ said Czesław Miłosz, a
Polish poet, writer, and diplomat, in his Nobel
Lecture in 1980. ‘And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an
acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn’t allow one to think of
anything else,’ he goes further to say.
Khashoggi,
who, after moving to the US, had been penning a column for the Washington Post,
was publicly critical of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, as well
as of the Saudi military intervention in the ongoing Yemeni civil war. Khashoggi
regularly wrote columns criticising the policies of the Saudi crown prince. His
killing, according to the Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor, was premeditated - most
certainly aimed at silencing and eliminating yet another dissenter.
Dissent has
predominantly been linked to the activity of thinking critically and questioning
the established notion of authority, meaning, and truth. A key question today is
about what roles dissent should play in democracy or any other form of
political arena or governance.
For Immanuel
Kant and Plato, dissent was important for developing the ability of individuals
to inspect their lives in relation to others or collective ability for public
reasoning. Even more recent philosophers, including the nineteenth-century
liberals like JS Mill, the twentieth-century critics of liberalism like Foucault,
and those belonging to the Frankfurt School, termed dissent as a vital good.
While many
see the acknowledgment of dissent identities as essential to a healthy democracy
and a wide-ranging pluralist political culture, others fear that dissent may lead
to the fragmentation of socio-cultural and political system.
