(HOST) Recently commentator Willem Lange has been thinking about citizens, silence and watchdogs that appear to be sleeping.
(LANGE) If you read editorial pages, you’ve noticed pieces asking why most of our national media helped lead us into the Iraq mess by headlining sensational claims of the Bush White House and burying reasonable doubts and stories of their own experienced staff reporters.
You may have read the op-ed piece by Eric Fair, a former US soldier, Arab linguist, and contract interrogator at Abu Ghraib, who now deplores the abuse he inflicted upon defenseless prisoners and wonders why it seems to have been forgotten. And you’ve no doubt heard about the plight of a Dartmouth squash coach’s fiancé, a 21-year-old German national who was arrested because of a misreading of sloppy handwriting on her visa.
When you take them together, the inescapable image is of a ham-fisted government leaning heavily, and occasionally brutally, upon those with whom it disagrees or who it thinks threaten it. A democratic government, at that, monitored by media watchdogs and led by the people’s representatives. Unfortunately, the watchdogs of the people seem to have been asleep or co-opted, and their representatives duped or grown pusillanimous. And I must say that in this I have felt all of us more or less complicit. One clause in Fair’s confession says it all: "I’m becoming more ashamed of my silence."
The American social theologian James Luther Adams, who studied under Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, also wrote about citizen silence. Adams was interrogated by the Gestapo, who recommended he return to America.
You’re thinking I’m going to compare the Bush Administration to the National Socialists of 70 years ago. I’m not. One mistake we make in our debates is using simplistic metaphors, which precludes any rational discussions of issues. It’s not so much the current administration that’s responsible for the expense and daily dying in the Mesopotamian morass. It’s we citizens and our timid media, much like those in Germany of the 1930s.
How have prisoner abuses occurred in the name and the uniform of the United States? How did Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice get away with the patently specious warnings about biological weapons and mushroom-cloud smoking guns? How was the Justice Department not laughed out of business when it arrested Michael Shehadeh, an Iranian-American journalist and activist in Los Angeles who immigrated because of our tradition of free speech? He was arrested at gunpoint by a dozen agents, three carloads of local cops, and a helicopter, who left his 3-year-old son alone in his house. How did these things happen? We let them. We failed to speak up. And our leaders trust that we’ll forgive or forget.
I’d hate to think that the September 11th attack has bullied us into silence that allows others to determine our fate and, ultimately, liberate us from our supposedly inalienable right to be free.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.