|
 magine
you were a mildly hysterical type, desperately worried about the
muzzling of "dissent" and the triumph of "government
propaganda" in the wake of the September Massacre. Imagine
that you wanted to "congratulate" Bill Maher, Barbara
Lee, Susan Sontag, Richard Gere (!), and the Berkeley City Council
for their willingness to "demur" from pro-war sentiment.
Then imagine that you were flailing around for a historical example
to illustrate the current state of intellectual freedom in America.
What would you come up with? The Red Scare of the 1920s? The McCarthy
Era? The "Sexual McCarthyism" of the Clinton Era?
Or how about
the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev?
If you selected
Brezhnev's U.S.S.R., then Robert Scheer of the Los
Angeles Times is the hysteriac for you. In his latest column,
Scheer first hands out kudos to Gere, Sontag, and their compatriots,
expressing shock that they have been called "wimps, traitors
and worse" by people foolish enough to "blindly accept
the actions taken in our name by our government." He goes on
to admit that yes, terrorism "needs to be stopped, fast and
efficiently." (A bold position, that.) But he worries that
it may be "dangerous for a democratic populace weighing if
and how to wage war to value unity above all else." As evidence
of this imprudent rush to unity, he notes the fact that the New
York Board of Education returned the Pledge of Allegiance to classrooms
last week — and then, with a flourish, offers the following
breathtaking analogy:
To understand
the limits of government-sponsored "unity," we might
ask the soldiers of the old Soviet Union. They marched with their
pledges and anthems into the treacherous terrain of Afghanistan
two decades ago, while at home the dissent that could have saved
them from military and economic disaster was systematically squelched.
But of course.
Richard Gere getting shouted down for making vapid comments is just
like the Soviet Union shipping dissidents off to Siberia. And having
high schoolers pledge allegiance to the American flag is just
the same as indoctrinating them into the marvels of Marxist-Leninism.
Scheer doesn't
really believe this, of course — or at least one assumes he
doesn't, since no one (Alec Baldwin aside) could possibly be quite
that dumb. But you can imagine how the analogy must have
tickled him. Gee, he probably thought, we're fighting
a war in Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union fought a war in Afghanistan,
so I'll compare American censorship to the Russian police state!
And then he ran with it, because there's nothing like the fantasy
of intellectual martyrdom to give an out-of-touch columnist that
special, Look-Ma-I'm-A-Rebel thrill.
Of course,
the Soviet Union wasn't just a fantasy — it was terribly real,
and so were the torments it inflicted on the Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs
who ran afoul of its taste for censorship. And the fact that an
insulated scribe like Robert Scheer could even dare to compare
today's United States — where a few insulated celebrities and
pseudo-intellectuals have been criticized, and nothing worse,
for making exceedingly asinine remarks — to that soul-crushing
nightmare society demonstrates an utter lack of proportion, common
sense, historical awareness, and basic decency.
But hey, Scheer
might shoot back, we're making kids say the Pledge of Allegiance
again. And if that isn't a step closer to the gulag, then what is?
|
