AS TOTALITARIANISM TAKES HOLD, I HEAR A JEWISH SILENCE
First, they came for the Communists. And I didn’t speak up, because I
wasn’t a Communist …
Rev. Martin Niemoller
Germany, 1945, upon his liberation from Dachau
I used to wonder what it was like to live as a non-Jew in Germany during the 1930’s. I am beginning to know. It is like being a frog sitting in a pot of water as it heats up slowly and imperceptibly, by bits and pieces, until it is too hot to get out.
Shortly after George W. Bush took the White House, America was attacked under suspicious circumstances. Strict Air Force protocol for intercepting wayward airplanes, and downing them if necessary, was mysteriously ignored.
Bush has done everything to forestall an inquiry into the event. First he saw to it that the Freedom of Information Act was gutted so that his regime could guard its “right to privacy.” When a new investigative commission became unavoidable, he designed it so that we would be unable to find out how much the regime knew in advance or whether there was any American complicity in the attacks. These are reasonable questions to ask, given the Bush family’s longstanding intimate relationship with the Bin Laden family and with Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from.
While carefully shielding the facts from public view, Bush has used the event of Sept. 11 to suck a huge reservoir of power into the executive branch of the Federal government and to increase its secrecy. His regime is characterized even by friends in the right wing as dictatorial, “out of control,” devoid of thoughtful policy, and driven by political machination. Not only have constitutional checks and balances increasingly become an empty formality, but he has actually created a secret parallel government consisting of nothing but an executive branch of unknown composition. Judges appointed by Bush, or his family and friends, turn around and issue rulings to protect him. The White House refuses to reveal how, or with whom, it makes its decisions; it refuses to enforce international treaties, court rulings, and laws passed by Congress.
Corporate criminals and convicted felons occupy powerful positions in the regime. Bush himself has escaped judgment for alleged drunk driving, cocaine possession, desertion from the armed forces, tax evasion and insider trading. Environmental protections have been rescinded on behalf of the worst of corporate polluters. Basic indicators of our well-being, such as the job market and the crime rate, have all turned against us. Having come to power by circumventing the constitutional process and getting votes thrown away, the regime now promotes a computerized voting technology which is owned by top Republican donors and which is not being audited or overseen.
The more privacy the Bush regime claims for itself, the less it allows to its citizens. It has rushed through legislation overruling the Bill of Rights, the right to a trial by jury and the due process of law. It has allocated to itself the right to prohibit people from leaving the country; to put Americans into makeshift “detention camps”; to vaccinate citizens forcibly; and to detain any person without charges, hearings, or the right to a lawyer. Reports of peaceful, nonviolent dissenters being arrested for no legal reason and held without due process, or prohibited from travel, are increasing daily. People working for environmental causes are particularly targeted. “Terrorism” is re-defined as speech or advocacy in disagreement with current policy, as was “communism” during the McCarthy era. Reasonable criticisms are muffled.
Invasions of our rights and freedoms have long surpassed our worst fears in December 2000, when a smiling media delivered the news of a presidency hijacked from the voters with the aid of a Supreme Court acting outside the law.
How can we expect others to come to our aid when we are targeted, if we comfortably reassure ourselves that the sugar-coated corporate militarism creeping up around us is targeting only others? Jews have been critical for so long of the world’s silence during the Holocaust, but as the “new tone in Washington” drones louder, the silence within the Jewish community has been deafening.
Nina Moliver
617-524-9432 (eve)
617-854-1728 (day)