“A Conspiracy of Silence” Sydney Williams
http://www.swtottd.blogspot.com
“Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.” Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
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.
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