"A Conspiracy of Silence"

 Apologies for two of these essays in three days. This one, however, had been started before the extraordinary events of the past ten days – the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump and the decision by Mr. Biden to not seek a second term. With these developments, the future always unclear has become further obscured.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtottd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“A Conspiracy of Silence”

July 24, 2024

 

“Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought

never to be the system of a regular government.”

                                                                                                                    Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

                                                                                                                    British Philosopher and Social Reformer

                                                                                                                    The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 1839

 

In many social settings, silence is the better alternative. As my mother would say: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Or my father: “Better to remain silent and have people think you a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” And my mother-in-law would quote the ancient proverb: “Speech is silver, silence is golden.” 

 

Yet silence does not always contain the remedies its fans claim. In The Trumpet of Conscience, published posthumously, Martin Luther King wrote: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1986, Elie Wiesel spoke: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever humans endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

 

The silence of which I write does not bear the evil of which King and Wiesel wrote and spoke, nor is it the silence of my late in-laws and parents that leads to worried looks and shaking heads in social gatherings. My concern is the Omeretà, the code of silence of politicians and their accommodating friends in the media – it is the silence that deprives people of the facts necessary to make informed decisions. As the British Parliamentarian Rory Stewart wrote in the prologue of his recent book How Not to be a Politician, “The public see the appearance that someone else chooses to share.” 

 

A conspiracy of silence was responsible for a refusal to publicly debate the origin of COVID-19. It could be seen over the past three and a half years in the refusal of the media to expose the horrific effects of an open southern border; in the dire ramifications of federal debt that exceeds one hundred percent of GDP; and in the potentially disastrous repercussions of allowing Iran to build an Atomic bomb.

 

Silence has kept people ignorant of the consequences of a partisan federal bureaucracy that employs 2.7 million people in two thousand agencies – 95% of whom give money to the Democratic Party. The growth of the administrative state is usually ignored by mainstream media, as it serves their progressive goals. Considered by some the “fourth branch” of government – and unlike the other three branches, which have swung between Republican and Democratic control – it has remained reliably Democratic. 

 

This Omeretà between the media and their favored politicians is not new. The American people were kept in the dark when President Woodrow Wilson, in October 1919, suffered a severe stroke that left him incapacitated. On March 28 1944, shortly after returning from the Tehran Conference, Franklin Roosevelt, at the urging of his daughter Anna, visited his doctor, cardiologist Dr. Harold G. Bruenn at Bethesda Medical Naval Hospital. He was diagnosed with reduced lung capacity, hypertension, acute bronchitis and acute congestive heart failure. Again, his condition was kept secret from the American public.

 

Recently, a conspiracy of silence surrounded the cognitive decline of President Biden, before it was witnessed by 50 million people in his debate with Donald Trump.  Mr. Biden’s behavior exposed what most people already knew, or suspected, or at least those whose reading is not limited to The New York Times and the Washington Post and whose viewing is not bounded by MSNBC and CNN. Barton Swaim wrote in last Monday’s Wall Street Journal: “Elected Democrats, with the eager compliance of their allies in the media, dismissed any expression of concern about the president’s acuity.”  As for the debate, it was telling to read and listen to mainstream media’s analysis of what a cold or sleep-deprivation could do to an individual, otherwise in command of his faculties. Most of us who had watched with alarm Mr. Biden’s decline over the past three-and-a-half years felt like Chico Marx in the 1933 film Duck Soup: “Who ya gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?” In The Spectator on July 22, Freddy Gray wrote that Biden’s health cover-up “may well go down as one of the greatest scandals in modern American politics.”

 

Silence, when it suppresses knowledge, is a dangerous stratagem, especially in a democracy where an informed electorate is critical; for voters hold power. Politicians of all stripes play loose with the truth. It is in their DNA, so it is left for the media to uncover the truth, without bias or prejudice. Their responsibility should always be to the public, to keep people informed. Candor on the part of politicians and accurate reporting by the media might have kept at bay the hatred and distrust that infests today’s politics.

"Truth or Consequences"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“Truth or Consequences?”

June 1, 2020

“Who ya gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?”

                                                                                    Chico Marx (1887-1961)

                                                                                    “Duck Soup,” 1933

Truth or Consequences was a long-running American game show, originally hosted by Ralph Edwards. If the contestant could not complete the “truth” portion there would be “consequences,” generally an embarrassing stunt. In 1950, Ralph Edwards announced he would host a show from the first town that changed its name to Truth and Consequences. On April Fool’s Day 1950, the town of Hot Spring, New Mexico voted to become Truth and Consequences.

“Quid est veritas?”, asked Pilate of Jesus. To Christians, truth is the word of God, for whom His son Jesus bore witness. For Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the “central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” while the “central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

The United States is a multi-racial and multi-ethnic country. We are White, Black, Native American, Asian, Hispanic and Pacific Islanders. According to the U.S. Census, 350 languages are spoken in the U.S. We identify as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and multiple other religions. We come (or came) from most every country in the world. Yet, despite those differences in heritage, as Americans we have fundamental interests in common. We live under a Constitution that consumes only forty-one pages, at least in my copy – a Constitution that restrains rather than enables government. We live in a country where liberty is prized above all else; where fundamental rights are guaranteed. under the rule of law. We have a government comprised of three co-equal branches, and a military to safeguard us from foreign enemies. We have police forces to carry out our state and local laws. And we have a judicial system to assure laws are adjudicated fairly and equitably, and to protect us from those in government, be they politicians, bureaucrats or police who use power for their own purposes.

It is a fundamental right that permits people to demonstrate. Protestors and rioters have responded to the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. Videos of the arrest are difficult to watch and show excessive force by the police. The four officers involved were fired, and Derek Chauvin was arrested for murder. But we live in a nation of laws, not of men or mobs. Dozens of buildings in Minneapolis were destroyed. Riots broke out across the United States, calling for an end to police brutality. People have been killed. Stores have been vandalized. Police vehicles have been burned. This has happened before, usually with the help of imported professionals:  In 2012, George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, a young black man in Sanford, Florida. Two and a half years later Eric Garner died in a chokehold by a New York policeman. A month later Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri was killed by a White police officer, Darren Wilson. One year later, in Baltimore, Freddie Gray, a young black man, died of back injuries while being transported in a police van, accompanied by six police officers. Destructive riots ensued. Hundreds of small businesses were looted and destroyed, many of them minority owned. It is understandable why members of the Black community are outraged and feel the system is rigged against them. Yet, with all its flaws, our system of justice, over time, generally reveals truth.  Burning one’s neighbor’s place of business or employment will not bring back Mr. Floyd, but justice, when properly applied, can help right wrongs.

Police brutality exists; that is reality and needs to be corrected when and where it exists. Yet it is also true that without laws and their enforcement no society can survive. How many members of the press would willingly swap jobs with an inner-city policeman or policewoman? Inequality will never disappear. There will always be wealth and privilege, and there will also always be an underclass. The important thing, in a liberal society, is social and economic mobility – an up-escalator that carries the aspirant, those dedicated to education and work. On the down-escalator are the dependent and morally corrupt, with no sense of self-worth or appreciation of the dignity a job provides.

Truths about COVID-19 are evasive. In part, because it is a novel virus, which means it is new and little about it is known, and in part because facts and science change. Yet the mantra has been: “Follow the science,” accompanied by a knowing smirk. Fatality rates are debated, as are practices like wearing masks. Of the latter, the highly praised Dr. Anthony Fauci has been ambivalent. On May 26, in an interview with America Magazine, he said they “absolutely” should be worn in church. Two days later, in an interview on CNN, he referred to masks as a symbolic gesture.

The shut-down of the economy was based on imperfect knowledge – an absence of truth – yet with severe consequences: unemployment at Depression-era levels; bankruptcies that have included oil drillers, retail outlets, restaurants, theater chains, hospitals, meatpackers, dairy farms, gyms, airlines and tens of thousands of small businesses, with more to come. Despair and loneliness have increased, as have suicides and drug usage. Despite knowing the truth of who was most vulnerable (the elderly and those with comorbidity issues), politicians in a few states like New York allowed the hospital-released, COVID-19 infected into nursing homes, where a third of all deaths have occurred. Politicians in all states shuttered schools, affecting 56 million school age children who were at little risk. Doing so has hurt their educational prospects and endangered those who rely on school meals. And everything done was “approved” by so-called experts. Absent a vaccine, COVID-19 will not be eradicated and it cannot be contained; it must be managed.

In the midst of riots and a pandemic, we should not forget how far we have come as a nation and a people. To most, a hundred years is a long time, but in the life span of mankind it is a short period. The discovery of penicillin in 1928 by Sir Alexander Fleming was the beginning of the antibiotic revolution. It was in 1953 that Dr. Jonas Salk produced a vaccine against polio, a year after 3,000 children died from the disease. The U.S. Armed Forces were segregated during World War II. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. My generation was the first to raise children without fear of diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis and polio. My generation was the first to serve in an integrated Armed Forces. Real GDP per capita has increased three-fold over the past seventy years, while life expectancy has risen by ten years. While we are not perfect and there are those who are evil, we are a compassionate people. As a percent of GDP, Americans give four times what Europeans do to charities.  As a nation, the success we have had is due to the government our Founding Father’s bequeathed us, the capitalist system which promoted the innovation that enriched us, and a culture of self-reliance, liberty, respect for personal property and the rule of law and an intolerance for racism. We owe it to ourselves and to one another to encourage a culture that is gender and colorblind as regards justice, but also one that promotes respect, decency and civility. Vincit omnia veritas.

In last weekend’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins wrote: “The vision of a people marching in the same direction, the same song in their hearts, is a fascist vision. It’s the societal ideal of North Korea.” That is not America. The American people can accept truth, and they can take the consequences when dealt with honestly, whether the subject is police brutality or a pandemic.