{"id":57924,"date":"2026-03-05T18:00:35","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T02:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=57924"},"modified":"2026-03-05T18:00:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T02:00:35","slug":"daniel-ellsberg-speaks-to-us-as-the-war-on-iran-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/05\/daniel-ellsberg-speaks-to-us-as-the-war-on-iran-continues\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Daniel Ellsberg<\/a> died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a \u201cnational security\u201d insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers<\/a> to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.<\/p>\n

Now, Ellsberg\u2019s voice is back via a compelling new book. \u201cTruth and Consequence<\/a>,\u201d being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father is dead now,\u201d Michael Ellsberg writes in the book\u2019s introduction, but \u201cI for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.\u201d Michael worked with his father\u2019s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s subtitle \u2013 offering reflections on \u201ccatastrophe, civil resistance, and hope\u201d \u2013 could hardly be more timely.<\/p>\n

Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.<\/p>\n

At the center of \u201cTruth and Consequence\u201d are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t delegate conscience,\u201d Daniel Ellsberg wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost people conform and accept,\u201d he noted. \u201cA minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,\u201d Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.<\/p>\n

He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who\u2019d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He\u2019d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter I released the papers,\u201d he vividly remembered, \u201csome people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me.\u201d Three years later, his takeaway was: \u201cAccept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society\u2019s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: \u201cThe function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing \u2013 sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence \u2013 and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next year he wrote: \u201cI have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power \u2013 those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.\u201d<\/p>\n

And: \u201cMost human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., \u2018evil\u2019) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically \u2018normal,\u2019 competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders \u2013 or, less often, in obedience to unlawful <\/em>orders.\u201d<\/p>\n

1982: \u201cMassacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders\u2019 geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one\u2019s life,\u201d he wrote in 1977. \u201cThe foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.\u201d<\/p>\n

1985: \u201cThe future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. \u201cUse of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,\u201d he wrote that year, \u201cis a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.\u201d<\/p>\n

And he added: \u201cI have never before shrunk from violence \u2013 from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.\u201d<\/p>\n

1984: \u201cNonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question \u2018What can I do to change this situation?\u2019 I have felt that power in my own life.\u201d<\/p>\n

1985: \u201cOne way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.\u201d<\/p>\n

1986: \u201cNonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.\u201d<\/p>\n

1990: \u201cAsk yourself, \u2018Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?\u2019 Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ellsberg\u2019s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up<\/a> his protest activities this way in 2006: \u201cI have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War<\/a>, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: \u201cThere is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine<\/em><\/a> includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy<\/em><\/a>, is free in e-book formats<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a \u201cnational security\u201d insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[814],"class_list":["post-57924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57928,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57924\/revisions\/57928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57924"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=57924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}