The war on dissent

As Americans unite behind their flag, they are in no mood to tolerate
criticism, writes SIMON HOUPT. But are they sacrificing the very freedom
they are defending?

By SIMON HOUPT

Saturday, October 6, 2001 ­ Print Edition, Page R1 (Toronto) Globe and Mail

PSD To HTML conversion is important to webmasters because they cannot use the PSD file as it is for their web pages. if you need PSD To HTML conversion service save yourself some time, effort and money and send it in to the professionals. NEW YORK -- When two airliners smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center last month, writer Susan Sontag was in Berlin, glued to CNN, the only U.S. newscast she could receive. In the 40 hours that followed, she watched a parade of military and political experts stroll across the screen, apparently united in their convictions over the causes of and solutions to
the terrorist attacks.

"It was amazing: To see Richard Holbrooke, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger -- they all can't stand each other -- to see them all come on and say exactly the same thing? It made me laugh!" Sontag said in an interview. "So I said: Why can't there be some debate?"

Stuck in Berlin by the closure of American airports, Sontag was asked by The New Yorker to contribute to the magazine's first Talk of the Town section published after the attacks. This is what she wrote: "The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy."

Noting that U.S. President George W. Bush had said the terrorists were cowards, she submitted, "if the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill
others . . . whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

The magazine hit newsstands in New York on Sept. 17. That night, 4,000 kilometres across the country in a Los Angeles television studio, Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher began his first show after the attacks with a tribute to one of those killed the previous week. Conservative pundit
Barbara Olson had been en route from Washington to L.A. to promote her new book on the show when her plane was flown into the Pentagon. Sitting a few feet from a seat left empty in memory of Olson, Maher echoed Sontag's words.

"We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, that's cowardly," he said. "Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, that's not cowardly."

Yikes. Maher is a contract provocateur, willing to say just about anything for ratings, and in the past advertisers have jauntily supported his schoolyard taunts. Coming so soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, his comments were considered hurtful and unbecoming for a man employed by ABC Networks, which is owned by Disney.

The day after the broadcast, FedEx pulled its ads in protest, followed by Sears Roebuck. As Maher tried desperately to spin his words, TV stations around the country began pulling Politically Incorrect from their airwaves. Even after Maher offered an outright apology, as many as 17 stations briefly dropped the show.

It was becoming apparent that the American public was in no mood to hear any criticism of the country or its leader.

Sontag was back in New York by this time, receiving anonymous threats and not so anonymous attacks for voicing her opinion. The New Yorker offices were deluged with letters of complaint and Sontag was pilloried in the pages of dozens of newspapers and political weeklies by the usual cast of curmudgeonly columnists. A senior editor at The New Republic grouped Sontag in with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, characterizing her as someone who wants America's global power to be dismantled.

On the Fox News Channel, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., a retired U.S. Army colonel suggested that any criticism of America's impending war on terrorism might be considered treasonous.

Less than one week after the World Trade Center attack, posters appeared in bus shelters and telephone booths around the country with the vow: "United We Stand." Millions of flags now flutter from lawns, rooftops, window ledges and car aerials. In words and deeds, Americans are declaring: "United We Speak."

Dissent has all but disappeared.

"It's all preposterous," Sontag said this week. "I'm stunned by the reaction, because it tells something about the mood of the country. I find that prevalence of group-think absolutely extraordinary. I find it extraordinary that the press secretary of the President of the United States
would say people have to watch what they say as well as what they do. That sends chills up and down my spine. If I take it seriously as a turn in the spirit of the country, I would be much more alarmed, but I hope that's not true.

"I just said something elementary and old-fashioned American. It's very depressing to see how scared people are to say anything except to read from this script. If I think that it is the beginning of a new age in which essentially freedom of speech is only something we afford in prosperous and calm times, then I would say that is the end of the United States of America being a country that I admire."

Sontag might not be interested in hearing, then, that Americans have always been quick to sacrifice freedom of speech in anxious times.

"It's part of the landscape," said Thomas McCoy, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in the First Amendment. "When there's a national crisis, particularly a war situation, you find widespread attempts to suppress unpopular or inconvenient viewpoints."

The strongest condemnation of unpopular viewpoints in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks came from presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer, who chastised Maher from the bully pulpit of the White House briefing room.

"All Americans . . . need to watch what they say, watch what they do," said Fleischer. ". . . This is not a time for remarks like that. It never is." The chilling effect of his comment wasn't diminished by the fact that he was also referring to a racist remark by a Louisiana Republican congressman.
While the First Amendment prevents government from clamping down on critical speech, private companies are free to censure their employees at whim. Nothing in law precludes ABC from cancelling Politically Incorrect if the network suddenly decides Maher's politically incorrect speech is more a liability than an asset.

If they choose, advertisers may back out of sponsoring the publication of opinions with which they or their audience disagree, as FedEx did.

Maher's comments brought "numerous general complaints," according to FedEx spokesman Jim McCluskey. "There's an environment there where words should be guarded carefully and there should be appropriate sensitivity to circumstances as they exist." McCluskey offered this odd assessment of a core American value: "I don't think freedom of speech is really at issue. It's just the nature in which free speech is used."

Unusually, it's not just critics of the Bush administration who are being censured. Ann Coulter, a bellicose right-wing columnist, declared on Sept. 13 that she had the solution to the terrorist threat from Islamic extremists.

"We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," she wrote in a column carried on the National Review's Web site.

After writing two incendiary follow-up pieces that editors chose not to run, Coulter griped -- as it happens, on Politically Incorrect -- that she was being censored. Turns out she'd spoken too soon: Coulter was dropped by National Review only after those public complaints upset her editors.

In widely publicized incidents, two other writers were fired last month after they criticized the actions George W. Bush took in the early hours after the terrorist attacks.

Dan Guthrie, a columnist and copy editor at The Daily Courier in the small town of Grants Pass, Ore., said he was fired after writing that Bush  "skedaddled" and hid out "in a Nebraska hole," waiting for the danger to pass. At the Texas City Sun, city editor Tom Gutting was fired for voicing similar sentiments. The paper's editor and publisher Les Daughtry Jr. announced Gutting's dismissal in a front-page apology.

"Tom's column was so offensive to me personally that I had a hard time getting all the way through it, and in fact, still feel ill from its effects  as I write this," Daughtry wrote. He concluded: "May God bless President George W. Bush and other leaders. And God bless America!"

Newly wary of the sensibilities of their audiences and the pressing need to maintain sources as the pipeline for information gets squeezed, many journalists are holding back from asking tough questions of the administration. Immediately after the attacks, some news anchors and many
local reporters donned red-white-and-blue flag pins, while a number of networks replaced their usual logos with American flags or red-white-and-blue renditions of the logos. A senior vice-president at the Fox News Channel said the network was proud to fly a waving American flag on screen.

"I'd sure prefer that to a hammer and sickle, I'll tell you that," Rick Moody said, as if those were the only two choices. "I think that there's some patriotism on camera now, and I think inasmuch as TV news often reflects America's mood at any given moment, that's what it's doing now."

To be sure, the media's goose-stepping disappoints some Americans.

"Our media, it's so pathetic and embarrassing," said the film director and left-wing rabble-rouser Michael Moore. Normally a frequent guest on cable-news shows, Moore says he hasn't been called to appear on any American TV stations since the attacks.

"I've been called by the CBC, BBC, ABC in Australia," he said in an interview. "I've been on the nightly newscast of every Western country, practically, and I've not had a single call from the American networks. . . . Because I'm going to go on there and say the things they don't want to
hear. I'm going to be off message. I'm not going to sing with the chorus. And the media is part of the chorus now. They're wearing their ribbons and they're not being objective journalists and they're not presenting all sides.

"The media has always given in to the government," Moore insisted. "In the early years of Vietnam, the media was all behind it. They didn't switch until Walter Cronkite took off his glasses," and made his famous "Stalemate" broadcast in February, 1968, in which he suggested that the war might be unwinnable. "It took four years for the first media person to say, 'This is
wrong,' " Moore said.

Recently, Moore was told that his publishers at HarperCollins (which is, like Fox News Channel, owned by Rupert Murdoch) would hold off on distributing his newest book. Entitled Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation -- with such chapter titles as Kill
Whitey, A Very American Coup and Idiot Nation -- the book was supposed to hit stores a few days ago in a sizable print run of 100,000. Last he heard, Moore said, the company is considering pulping the books.

"My problems pale in comparison to [the victims of the attacks and their families], so I'm not whining about it. I'm just saying this is a time when writers and artists need to really act with courage, stand up, say the things that they need to say, and trust that there's enough of the American public that will hear what you're saying."

On Sept. 12, Moore posted a diary entry on his Web site, MichaelMoore.com, suggesting that perhaps the U.S. didn't have the moral authority to decry the activities of terrorists.

"We abhor terrorism -- unless we're the ones doing the terrorizing. We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed more than 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers! We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we
never let the human suffering THAT causes interrupt our day one single bit."

The response? Moore says his site is getting more than one million hits per week.

"People are desperate," he says. "They're looking for alternative sources of information." Since the attacks, he has received more than 70,000 e-mails. Most of them are supportive but he acknowledges that many are not. "The tone of the hate mail that I've received is as vicious and violent as it's ever been toward me, in terms of threatening to kill me and do other things to me."

Clearly, the American people are in no mood for speech that might challenge their certainties. Thursday night on Politically Incorrect, political cartoonist Dan Rall was roundly booed when he reminded the audience that George W. Bush's victory in November's presidential election was still
unresolved. "That's so Sept. 10th," scolded a patronizing Bill Maher. "It really is."

The impulse to clamp down on critical speech isn't new. In 1918, with American troops dying in Europe, socialist Eugene Debs was charged and convicted under the war-time Espionage Act for protesting the First World War. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and disenfranchised, losing his citizenship for life. (Debs still managed to run for president from prison on the Socialist ticket and earn about one million votes.)

During the Red Scare of the 1940s and '50s, which Senator Joseph McCarthy masterfully exploited, public fear of Communists in America was so strong that the Harvard sociologist Samuel Stouffer found two-thirds of people polled in 1954 said a Communist shouldn't be permitted to speak. Sixty per cent said an atheist shouldn't be permitted to speak.

"The Cold War was viewed as a major national crisis," said Prof. McCoy, "so any dissenters were being dragged before the House Un-American Activities Committee and fired from their jobs in Hollywood and universities.

"It just seems that when we feel the need to pull together against a common enemy, our normal American tolerance for dissent is a casualty of that felt need to pull together."

In a nation that haughtily markets itself to the rest of the world as a haven for free speech, why is dissent regarded as unpatriotic, as un-American, during times of crisis?

Moore thinks it's something in the national character of Americans. He is censoring himself in publishing comments that might prove hurtful to the twin-tower victims -- one of his friends was on the plane that slammed into the south tower -- but he is trying to understand how the tragedy occurred.

"I still can't get out of my head how three guys with box cutters keep 90 people at bay. And yet I don't want to blame the victims for not doing anything. But what is it in us -- they cut one person's throat, we watch one person die and then we're paralyzed with fear? What is that?"

Moore is trying to tread carefully, but he believes the national character is revealed in both the media's obsequiousness and the apparently passive behaviour of the passengers on at least two of the planes. "We're a nation that is very weak-kneed and very weak-willed, and we talk a big harrumph, alright?"

Sontag chalks up the need for unanimity to something else. "It's a kind of magical thinking that's similar, I suppose, to what's keeping people off airplanes. No one wants to take an airplane now . . . they're all empty, they've all become jinxed, and in the same way there is a kind of magical
thinking that if we all just put out our flags and say exactly the same thing, we're safer. I don't understand it."

Prof. McCoy doesn't understand it, either, but he can appreciate the inherent irony. "In the course of banding together to defend what we believe in, we have a tendency to sacrifice one of the core beliefs that we're defending. That is ironic, but it is an observable fact."

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