September 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Collateral Damage

Margaret Burnham, an attorney and former judge, teaches at Northeastern University School of Law. During the 1980s, when she was one of very few African American women on the MIT faculty, Burnham was active in campus anti-apartheid and divestment campaigns.

Fear, partnered with silence, is once again, as it did a half century ago, erasing dissent from the American political landscape. Orthodoxy, coupled with xenophobia, is again squelching the voice of the left and impoverishing the marketplace of political debate. In its wake September 11 has left with us scorched cities, ruptured political communities, censored discourse, and a simplistic, Manichean world view from which is emerging an eerie retake of the great American red scare. History teaches that although the destroyed physical space of Ground Zero can be rebuilt, large swaths of political space will remain toxic for generations to come.

Washington, DC, April 20, 2002 © Josh Reynolds

In fact the roots of today's repression are embedded in the still smoldering ground of earlier campaigns to rid American politics of socialists and communists--yesterday's evildoers. Gathering steam across the first half of the century, ultimately the red scare of the 1950s ravaged cultural life, destroyed careers and families, and decimated the vibrant network of organizations and institutions that constituted the infrastructure of a progressive vision. Insularity and nativism were rewarded; internationalism was suspect. For this costly travesty, now universally acknowledged as wrong, America was robbed of a vigorous, class-conscious political voice; the upshot was a timid labor movement and a civil rights movement too frightened to link up with its natural allies in other struggles. Patriotism and loyalty were exploited to mask gaping class divisions that might otherwise have inspired successful movements for economic equity. The cleavage of the world into good democratic states fighting against evil communist ones mocked a complex global reality, making it possible for Americans to distance themselves from the connection between their privileged lives and world politics. In a perverse double whammy, anticommunist ideology was employed to justify both a mushrooming military and the silencing of its critics in the peace movement.

These wounds still bleed. The red scare of the 1950s planted the seeds out of which grew President Bush's political evangelism as well as Attorney General Ashcroft's demagogic calculus situating security above constitutional rights. Fifty years later, based in part on newly released government documents, careful historical studies have explored the multiple features of McCarthyism, proffering a clearer picture of exactly how it operated, and demonstrating what went wrong in the courts, the unions, the universities, and other institutions. Some apologies and reparations, grudging but important nonetheless, have been made, bad laws repealed, and reputations disinterred. But this process of coming to terms with a disastrous moment in history has really only just begun, and it will all be for naught if we are unable to apply even such recent lessons to the current crisis.

After last September Washington could have rejected these well-worn patterns of militarism abroad and repression at home. As South Africa's dramatic rejection of cyclical retribution makes clear, a country's political choices in its troubled times are not preordained. But instead of taking a decisive turn toward diplomacy, multilateralism, and democratic values, the Bush/Ashcroft axis, for reasons history will once again fully reveal, chose to shove the country back into what William O. Douglas, writing in 1969, described as the "black silence of fear."

A common feature of America's repressive campaigns is that no one knows when they will end, for the enemy is always indeterminate and illusive. He is, or could be, next door and underground; he is alien but close, of us but foreign. In this assessment, a year after September 11, it is hard to say whether we are at the beginning, middle, or end of the new repression, particularly because what we are experiencing today draws so directly from the McCarthy era. We now know that, like a latent virus, the tools of that period lay waiting for redeployment. What is different now is the speed with which the machinery of repression has been put into play. Like the old ones, the new targets--immigrants, Muslims, and people living on the economic margins--have been anathematized, criminalized, and demonized. Ethnic profiling, once rejected by most Americans, is now expected not only of the police but of civilians as well. In a scary reprise of the policies underlying our World War II internment camps, the authorities have questioned over 5000 immigrants based solely on their age, gender, and country of origin. Airline personnel are fully expected to profile; Ashcroft's TIPS initiative directs our letter carriers to snoop at our mail.

Exploiting the crisis to trot out new ammunition, the Justice Department has left in shreds constitutional rights of association and of political speech and the rights afforded criminal defendants. The new prosecutorial methods--secret imprisonment, secret hearings, secret evidence, secret searches--allegedly introduced only to fight terrorism, inevitably will bleed into other arenas (especially where "terrorism" is a legal cipher) and could become the new norm in the federal criminal and immigration courts. Concentrating these vast new powers in the executive branch is particularly worrisome where Congress has shown itself to be incapable of being an equal partner--most notably in its fast track approval, virtually sight unseen, of the USA Patriot Act--or of performing its traditional role of oversight.

No showing has yet been made that such a major shift in government powers was necessary to meet the threat of terrorism. Before September 11 the law forbade political assassination. The McCarran-Walter Act, McCarthyism's ugly legacy, was repealed and the prejudices behind it discredited. But even these paltry efforts to get civil liberties back on course after the abuses of the McCarthy period have now been dramatically reversed. These new draconian measures have been adopted with no evidence that they will cure the problem of terrorism. The states have quickly adopted their own repressive copycat laws. The structural lines between domestic policing and foreign intelligence have been eviscerated.

And, following Ashcroft's admonition that criticism "gives ammunition to America's enemy," millions of Americans consider themselves to be deputized thought police. What one patriotic radio station did to purge its inventory--it banned "Blowin' in the Wind"--suggests how easy it is for us to lose our cultural and political bearings, and to succumb to apathy, cynicism, fear, and silence.

It's déjà vu all over again, people.

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