Letters to the Editor
Publican
Published Letters: 112 Editor's Choice: 1
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If Free Speech thrives, then why are tubes annonymous?
[Read the article: The Lawless Surveillance State]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn - you assert:
"This doesn't mean there is a complete erosion of freedom equal to all of those societies. Free speech still basically thrives;"
Well, if that's the case, why are the majority of posters annonymous?
I think we all know the answer to that.
The fact is, jobs, careers, families, reputations, and even lives would be destroyed if some of the views here were attributed to individuals.
We are free to speak annonymously on the tubes.
But, stand up and speak out at a staff meeting or a Board meeting or at a public hearing. Write a dissenting memo, leak a document, or talk to the press on the record criticing policy, the boss, the company, or the Adminsitration in a way that represents a real threat to power - and you become a trouble maker and you risk career suicide in most workplaces.
You also risk community prestige and standing.
Even your kids daycare and school are - as they say - fair game.
Think this doesn't happen every day in the good ole US of A?
Glenn, you make these observations every day regarding the motivations of the media elite. The dynamic can be described as self censorship, careerism, or self preservation.
But just when does de facto cultural repression and self preservation/advancement cross the line and make a mockery of into de jure free speech?
Very few have the luxury of real free speech - if that speech includes saying unpopular things in a way that is a real challenge to power.
(and that prior Orwell excerpt on the Proles is a well highlighted adm re-read text in my rabit eared paperback copy of 1984)
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@ Hume's Ghost on Orwell
[Read the article: The Lawless Surveillance State]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dear Hume's Ghost - your post recalled this excerpt from "Whistleblowers: broken lives & organizational power" by C. Fred Alford (Cornell U. Press. 2001)
"What the scapegoat knows"
Let us call this whistleblower I am talking about the last man. Not Nietzche's last man, who wants nothing more than a comfortable existence, but George Orwell's last man in "1984", Winston Smith, who sacrifices everything for a little piece of "ownlife". Exposed and tortured by O'Brian, Simth is finally placed before a three-paneled mirror, the kind one finds in clothing stores so one can see if the suit fits. Pale, naked, looking like a skeleton, missing some teeth, Smith doesn't recognize himself for a moment. Says O'Brian, "If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct". The whistleblower is the last man, not just tortured, but exposed and sacrificed so that others might see what it costs to be an individual in this benighted world. ...
What if the autonomous individual exists, but the organization can not stand it, mobilizing vast resources in the service of the individual's destruction? ... Rather than assume that the individual exists, or does not, it may be more fruitful to focus on the ceremonies of his destruction. Consider the possibility that the individual destroyed is still ann individual. Indeed, the individual destroyed is the best archaeological evidence of the individual's clandestine presence in history.
To run up against the organization is to risk obliteration. In a totalitarian regime, nothing remains after one runs afoul of the organization. Before his arrest, Winston Smith's job was to alter the historical record so as to make it appear that dissidents had never been born. In a democratic society, the sacrificed individual remains. If we listen to him or her, we may learn something not just about individuality but about the forces that confront it. ...
How can we best learn from the last man? ... I think the whistleblower has as much to teach us about politics as about suffering. Or rather, it is the suffering of the whistleblower that connects these two terms. The story of the first scapegoat will tell us why [recounts Leviticus 16:21-22] ...
Think about how much the scapegoat must know. For may whistleblowers, this knowledge is like a mortal illness. ... They do not just know the sins of the tribe, they are afflicted with them. My plan has been to follow the scapegoat into the desert of his exile and there to study his affliction so that I might learn the sins of the tribe. ...
When I listen to whistleblowers, I feel awe at one who has stepped outside the skin of the world and lived to tell about it. ..Daniel Ellsberg.. said that his former friends and colleagues regarded him with neither admiration nor censure but with wonder, as though he were a space-walking astronaut who had cut his lifeline to the mother ship. What was this mother ship? Was it the academic-military-industrial complex, the system, the organization? Call it what you will, it is not so much a precise concept as an overwhelming feeling. ...
This [feeling] is so important ..because of what it tells us about the forces that hold society together and their consequences: the willingness of most people to do anything not to be sent space-walking....
To be a whistleblower is to step outside the Great Chain of Being, to join not just another religion, but another world. Sometimes this world is called the margins of society, but to the whistleblower it feels like outer space. ...
Being a whistleblower means stepping outside [society's transcendent moral] order. It is a momentous step. Most people, including the whistleblower, don't recognize it as such until the whistleblower has done it. The he or she knows what it is to go space-walking. ...
Modern society is marked by multiple centers of meaning, so that, for example, a whistleblower might turn to his or her religion to find meaning after being fired by General Motors for blowing the whistle. It's a good theory, but it does not work so well in real life. Meaning tends to follow power, and power works to discipline the whistleblower in ways that isolate him or her from alternative sources of meaning. Much may be learned by studying how this happens."
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Kucinich as excluded by the media from the debate
[Read the article: Media hostility toward anti-establishment candidates]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How could that be ignored?