Silence of the Lambs. May 14, 2006. An essay from the new book, Writing on the Wall.
The recent report that the nation’s largest phone companies turned over data on millions of Americans is less surprising than the somewhat muted response it has evoked. If polls are to be believed, nearly 70% of those polled find nothing objectionable in the secret tracking of phone calls by the National Security Agency, the NSA, without directly challenging the accuracy of such polls. The simple facts that folks aren’t up in arms, marching on the White House, like angry, cinematic villagers, torches in hand, on the tracks of a Frankenstein monster, is fine. The relative silence of Americans, not pundits who are paid to have their opinions, but of average folks on this earth-shattering issue, suggest that it may be true. What does this say about Americans? It suggests that people have incredible faith in the government, or are so immobilized by fear that they welcome virtually anything the state advances, as long as it promises safety. Some will say this is a natural response after 9/11, yet this didn’t begin on 9/11.
Illegal government spying on Americans has a long history in this country, occasioned by the fears unleashed during the Cold War. However, even in the 1970s, when such spying was uncovered, the result was not an end to such practices, but a transfer to another file under another pretext. One need only read Frank Donner’s 1981 book, The Age of Surveillance. This documented history is long, clear and undeniable, yet most Americans neither know, nor seem to want to know about what happened then or what’s happening now.
That great French observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw these qualities in Americans over 150 years ago, writing in his 1835 classic, Democracy in America, “A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart, the slave of its own well being awaiting but the hand that will bind it. By such a nation, the despotism of faction is not less to be dreaded than the despotism of an individual. When the bulk of the community is engrossed by private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of getting the upper hand in public affairs. At such times, it is not rare to see upon the great stages of the world, as we see at our theaters, a multitude represented by a few players who alone speak in the name of an absent or inattentive crowd. They alone are in action whilst all are stationary. They regulate everything by their own caprice. They change the laws and tyrannize at will over the manners of the country, and then wonder to see into how small a number of weak and worthless hands a great people may fall.”
As the White House and its lapdog press peddle the potion of fear and beat the drum for more war, the alleged guarantees of the Constitution are shredded like tissue paper, daily. War is based on lies, US torture chambers, in Guantanamo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan; secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and beyond. And now, the tracking of millions of calls of Americans. Something is broken in Babylon, yet all we hear today is The Silence of the Lambs. You’ve been listening to an essay from the new book, Writing on the Wall. This is its author, Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
