NEW YORK, 2002 = MOSCOW, 1975: Jonathan Steele of "The Guardian" penned an especially silly piece the other day. Here's the headline: "New York is starting to feel like Brezhnev's Moscow/Public debate in America has now become a question of loyalty." It's about how dissent is being snuffed out here in the land of the free:
Listening to these anguished but private complaints suddenly reminded me of the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era when lower-level officials, journalists and other fringe members of the regime sat around their kitchen tables, expressing their true views only to family and close friends. A far-fetched analogy, of course, until you look at the narrowness of public discussion, not just on Israeli-Palestinian issues, but also on the threatened American attack on Iraq and the administration's war on terrorism in general.
Ah, yes. Just like Brezhnev's Moscow, dissenters in New York are being snatched off the street by the secret police and thrown into mental hospitals. The first to go were all those columnists from the "New York Times" who actually support the Palestinian side. No doubt William Safire turned them in. Later, Steele chats with Noam Chomsky, who complains that his extremist views are being shut out of the public sphere by CNN but nonetheless finds himself being rapturously received all over the country:
Like an intellectual rock star he is perpetually on the move, travelling to packed auditoria on campuses around the US and abroad. "I spend about an hour every night turning down email requests to speak," he said.
Apparently, Chomsky's best-selling book "9-11" is being circulated samizdat-style, just like the Soviet Union! Brave souls are cranking out versions in their basements, then wrapping the revolutionary words inside a copy of "All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings," the book by George Bush Sr. (the "Father of the Revolution") that all citizens have been required to carry and memorize since Sept. 11. Sheez. After more mealy-mouthed complaints that equate strongly stated disagreement over certain issues with brutal Soviet censorship, we get this zinger of an ending:
The fascination, and frustration, of America has always been the way one society can produce so much optimistic vigour and risk-taking intellectual energy alongside a ruling culture of such boorish ignorance and cruelty. To judge from the east coast today, the middle-aged liberal intelligentsia is letting itself be intimidated into taking the wrong side.
I'm sure that brought a round of jaunty "here, here's" in the "Guardian" newsroom. However, it's nothing but a simple slander. The "optimistic vigor and risk-taking intellectual energy" of America is largely propagated by our so-called ruling class, which is composed of inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators in every conceivable field. Compare that to England, where the ruling class is largely composed of hereditary lords and dukes whose claims to ruling-class status are based on their distant ancestors. A driving force behind America's founding was the desire to escape the "boorish ignorance and cruelty" of those folks. The same goes for the majority of the anti-colonial movements that have swept the former British Empire since the end of the First World War, movements that the "Guardian" would no doubt applaud. Let's not forget that.
