Political Repression

2006–10-19 (Corey Robin, London Review of Books) Was he? Had he?

Journalists afraid for their careers aren’t likely to question their government in time of war. And they haven’t. ABC’s Ted Koppel, reputed to be one of the most aggressive interviewers in the business, admits that ‘we were too timid before the war’ in Iraq. The PBS anchor Jim Lehrer says: ‘It would have been difficult to have had debates [about occupying Iraq] . . . you’d have had to have gone against the grain.’ The few journalists who bucked the trend were swiftly punished. After criticising the media for its coverage of the war, Ashleigh Banfield was ‘taken to the woodshed’ by her bosses, according to a Newsday report, and her career at NBC was finished. A Wall Street Journal reporter sent a personal email describing the terrible situation in Iraq: her editors pulled her out of the country and off the story.

The notion of a balance between freedom and security mistakenly assumes that its benefits and burdens will be distributed equally among all members of society. Cole and Dempsey point out that some members of society, often the most marginalised and despised – gays and leftists during the Cold War, Arabs and Muslims (and gays and leftists to a lesser degree) today – are always forced to give up their freedoms so that the rest can enjoy their security. Indeed, it is precisely because these groups are powerless, and not because they are dangerous, that the powerful can require them to bear the cost.

Corey Robin, the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea, teaches political science at Brooklyn College and CUNY. He is writing a book about political repression in the United States.