Why We Take the Moral High Road

We do it, first of all, because it’s the right thing to do. We do it irrespective of whether we expect to win. You don’t decide on what’s right to do on the basis of whether or not you are guaranteed to win or if you think you have a chance to win and you do a calculation about whether it’s worthwhile or not - as if people’s lives and the planet’s future and all of its creatures should be subjected to odds’ calculations the way you’d do it if you were making a bet. We aren’t going to bet on people’s lives and we’re not going to gamble with the planet’s fate. That’s for the other side to do.

Our adversaries say that torturing people and killing innocent people - men, women and children - in the hundreds of thousands is worth it because it advances their goddamn empire and enriches them and their friends’ pockets. And their enablers, those complicit Democrats, those sorry excuses for human beings, who say that “it’s off the table,” who say that “it’s not worth it,” who say, lying through their teeth, that they “haven’t seen any impeachable offenses,” who think to themselves that it’s in the best interests of their party and the empire that they serve to keep the war and killing going longer and to keep Bush and Cheney in office, these are the people making these horrid calculations.

They want to convince us that, "Oh, yes, you’re right, we don’t have the votes, it’s not going to succeed." They want us to believe that you make decisions about whether you’re going to fight against mass murder, torture, dictatorial assertions of power, violations of the law and the Constitution, massive illegal spying and so on by figuring out whether you “have the votes.” Since when is it right for you to decide whether or not you’re going to fight injustice, profound immorality, mass murder and torture on the basis of whether or not you think you can win? What kind of immoral logic is that?! We say fuck that.

We don’t have to lie and we don’t have to suppress science and we don’t have to oppress people. But our adversaries do and this system of imperialism does. Our adversaries have to do all of these things because if they don’t, they can’t possibly get their way. In order to get their way, they have to do deeply immoral, barbaric, monstrous things – daily, hourly, minute by minute.

So when we talk to people about why they should Declare It Now and Wear Orange, we have a lot of reasons we can and should give them, including that our strategy can work and that we can win, but the most important argument we have is this: fighting tyrants, war criminals and torturers is the right thing to do. It’s the only right thing to do. You cannot go along and remain silent because to do so is to be a colluder and a "Good German." You cannot wiggle out of this if you have a conscience.

What’s the counter-argument to our moral stance? THERE IS NO COUNTER-ARGUMENT. There is no moral counter-argument.