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On Daniel Ellsberg

The drama of Ellsberg’s life, however unique his circumstances, isn’t alien or inaccessible, because it is also the drama of a political life as such: the steady, growing awareness of one’s participation in a system that one understands to be intolerable, and the eventual action that breaks with it. On this path, he was helped along not just by the antiwar movement, but by a number of others who were somewhere along the same path, even if they didn’t end up where he did.