By Lewis Lapham
Award-winning columnist Lewis Lapham matters an pressing new polemic in regards to the strangling of significant dissent—the lifeblood of democracy—at the arms of a central authority and media more and more beholden to the rich few. by no means earlier than, Lapham argues, have voices of protest been so locked out of the mainstream dialog, so marginalized and muted by way of a central authority that recklessly disregards civil liberties. in the course of the "war on terror," we are facing a predicament of democracy as severe as any in our historical past. Gag Rule is a rousing and beneficial name to motion in safeguard of the precise to elevate our voices and feature these voices heard.
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Extra resources for Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
Sample text
At the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California, Secretary Rumsfeld attributed the impression of failure to the bias of the liberal news media. “The part of the picture that’s negative is being *Three weeks before the Nazi invasion of Poland in the summer of 1939, Adolf Hitler presented the German general staff with a similarly brave choice: “The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. ” A transgression so broadly defined allows for so many interpretations, many of them fanciful and most of them abusive, that the Justice Department was attaching the label of terrorism to its investigations of drug traffickers, money launderers, and child pornographers.
And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns. . There’s another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 46 GAG RULE premise of the legislation had provoked complaints across the whole of the political spectrum—from senators both liberal and conservative, from members of the National Rifle Association as well as members of the American Civil Liberties Union. The shows of unruliness offended the attorney general. Undertaking to defend the purposes of the PATRIOT Act, he scheduled appearances in sixteen states deemed important to the president’s winning the election of 2004.
The anecdotal evidence was by no means so straightforward as the arithmetic. My own observations traveling around the country during the months of September and October suggested the widespread presence of attitudes more heavily weighted with ambiguity and doubt. In California, Texas, Oregon, and Iowa, I could find little trace or sign of the militant spirit presumably eager to pat the dog of war. ” Instead of arguing with one another, the politicians read prepared statements into the C-SPAN cameras, striking handsome poses, producing certificates of their moral character and worth, expressing their “deep concern” for human suffering and their “profound awareness” of the distinction between war and peace.
