When you turn “torture” into “enhanced interrogation,” or murdered children into “collateral damage,” you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. “The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He added that “the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.”” Angling language “We tend to assume that institutions will automatically maintain themselves against even the most direct attacks.” As Yale professor Timothy Snyder writes in his recent book, On Tyranny: Living in a bubble of ‘false safety’, as if nothing can go wrong, believing that democracy and its accompanying institutions are strong enough to withstand any onslaught, without guarding it closely, is how a society ends up here. (Our real-life comparative equivalent being late 1930s/early 1940s Germany.)Īs in The Handmaid’s Tale, a new order would soon exist, and people would wonder how they got there. Probably because these things never seem like they can happen. Some would try to escape many would wait too long and wonder why they had not gone sooner. They’d try to protest but be met with violence against which they have no defense. And by the time they felt the true violations of their individual sovereignty encroaching, it would already be too late. After all, it’s only temporary, right? Surely someone else will do something about it. Would Americans even be prepared, or would they, like in The Handmaid’s Tale, be meek, “Well, it’s only temporary…” and “Let’s wait and see…”? Incrementally it’s not so bad, it seems. We’ve seen some version of this play out in countries we’ve widely regarded with dismay as “uncivilized” or “in need of American intervention”. Make a few changes in society that anger people but don’t ultimately send a big enough alarm through the population – stage an attack, blame some false perpetrator, declare martial law and claim it’s only temporary. It would be not entirely different from what is happening in the US today. Watching the new iteration of The Handmaid’s Tale, after having re-read the book a few weeks ago, I’m struck (as most people are) by the depiction of how easy it would be to end up with a society as extreme and dramatically transformed as that in the show/book. Anything that creates terror in or threatens a whole population or group. I am thinking: What is terrorism? It is a form of tyranny – the uncertainty and fear created by unstable and unpredictable forces, among which, to my mind, the United States government/president can be counted at present. This is not the most coherent “essay” but I am overflowing with thoughts I don’t have the time or wherewithal to organize. It is an admission that humanity has finally touched the peak of apprehension and the nadir of impotence.” -from Climate of Fear, Wole Soyinka “When anticipation of, and salivation over, the trickle of power sinks to the level of cruelty to helpless children, one is tempted to accept that all that is left to say is-nothing.
“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.” -from On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder
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