Sunday, November 10, 2002

The New McCarthyism: Secret Arrest and Detention instead of Blacklisting. We are entering a new dark age under the guise of fighting terrorism.  Several people have commented to me in the week after the election that this feels to them like 1948, after Henry Wallace lost his battle with Truman, and the cold war was being consolidated in Washington.  The next few years brought a communist witch hunt, the blacklisting of numerous artists, writers, and educators, and the firing of many government employees, plus consideration of nuclear war in Korea.   A few of the people caught up in McCarthyism were actual Russian spies.  The overwhelming majority,  say 99.9%, were Americans targeted for exercising their freedom of speech, who held unpopular views, or who challenged the prevailing orthodoxy.  At that time, with little technical prowess, the primary weapon of the government was the loyalty oath.  If someone wouldn’t swear the oath, or would not swear never to have been a communist, their lives and careers were targeted for destruction.   Despite all the ruined lives, false accusations, and fear inspired during the McCarthy period, much of it was acted out in public, so that blacklisting was done openly, not in secret.    What is scary today is how much radical improvements in technology and the embrace of totalitarian secrecy by the Bush administration has changed the balance of power- giving the government secret tools that are devastating to liberty and the rights of free speech and association.  The new Homeland security bill will create a vast government department whose primary mission will be to closely monitor the actions of all individuals in the U.S. for signs that may point to terrorism.  The powers are sweeping enough to allow even local governments the power to secretly read emails, to arrest people based on their unpopular thoughts as expressed in emails or telephone conversations.    So far, the worst abuses have only been directed at immigrants, and a few unlucky Americans.  But we all believe that another terrorist attack is inevitable.  So when such an attack occurs, the hysteria will ratchet up to a new level, and there will be tremendous pressure to suppress entire groups of citizens through surveillance, monitoring and secret detentions.  Thousands will be targeted, but only a tiny handful may be truly dangerous.   I talked to a woman in church today who had recently gone to the U.S. airbase in Panama with her husband for the reunion of his WWII tactical fighter squadron.  All the young airmen at the base were eager to hear from the veterans, they were raring to go and bomb Iraq or Afghanistan.  Her husband, the commander of the squadron, was terribly upset.  He is very much against war with Iraq, and his comment was that today’s fighter pilots are so isolated by technology they think they are in a video arcade.  He said he actually watched men parachuting out of his plane, knowing some of them may be killed before they reached the ground.  But these young pilots simply monitored consoles and pressed buttons, and suddenly they are fighting and bombing from hundreds of miles away.  They never see the death.  They never see the war.  Like the character in Ender’s Game, they fight shielded from the consequences of their actions.  In fiction, Ender then spent thousands of years trying to atone for his destruction of an alien species.  In real life, only those with real knowledge will be able to atone.   In the same way, secrecy prevents government officials from being exposed to the consequences of their actions.  We know there are those among us who acting out of hysteria would sacrifice rights and individual freedoms for thousands or even millions if ordered to do so.  If they are allowed to operate in secret, many will not even know what they have done. 10:05:38 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2002 Toby Sackton. Last update: 12/26/2002; 9:30:58 PM.