http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/1039/42/367921.htm
America Isn't Much Better Than U.S.S.R.
By Alexei Bayer
02 June 2008
For a while in the mid-1970s, whenever I met an American, I would
typically be the first person from the Soviet Union they had set their eyes on.
I gladly practiced my English by relating to them the horrors of Communist
oppression and lamenting the lack of freedom in the country that I left behind.
Their usual reaction to my stories was sympathy for my plight. This is
why I was taken aback when an older African-American college classmate didn't
shake his head in chagrin after I rattled off my usual catalog of woes. On the
contrary, he cut into me.
"Why do you people allow this to go on?" he asked sharply. "Why don't you
go down into the street and protest? We do."
To my objections that Americans, either black or white, risk little by
protesting, he told me about the civil rights struggle in the South and the
kind of murders and police brutality that occurred during that period.
"Sure, we don't have the KGB," he concluded. "But that's because we keep
our government in line. The KGB provides an excuse for you to stay apathetic.
If you don't stand up for your freedom, you don't deserve to have it."
I wonder what he thinks about the situation in the United States now.
Unlike the war in Vietnam, which divided the country and led to violent student
protests, the war in Iraq has Americans largely united. Although nearly
two-thirds believe that it was the wrong thing to do and disapprove of how U.S.
President George W. Bush has been handling it, anti-war protests have been, at
best, lukewarm.
The nation expressed no objections at all to such a remarkably
un-American establishment as Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. Reports of torture,
detention of obviously innocent or mistakenly arrested persons and outright war
crimes committed in violation of treaties signed by the U.S. government go
uninvestigated by law enforcement authorities. U.S. citizens accused of
terrorism have had their civil rights stripped before they have been found
guilty.
These practices don't reach the extent of Stalinist terror, but they are
surely not much better than what went on in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union.
Sure, there are brave lawyers defending detainees on their own time and
commentators writing about the situation, albeit mostly on the Internet and not
in the mainstream media. The general public remains apathetic and meek -- much
like the Soviet public was in the 1970s and 1980s.
In fact, the bravery of a handful of Soviet dissidents looks even more
impressive in retrospect, in comparison with the current U.S. apathy.
Establishment figures who cast aside government-provided privilege and spoke
out against injustice in the Soviet Union included decorated General Pyotr
Grigorenko and scientist Andrei Sakharov. In 1968, following the invasion of
Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, Brezhnev's version of
the coalition of the willing, eight very brave souls came out to Red Square to
protest. Despite severe oppression, the underground journal Chronicles of
Current Events had plenty of dissident activities to report in each of its
issues.
The United States' origins are grounded in a violent protest against
tyranny. When the people of Massachusetts objected to taxation without
representation, they dumped English tea into the Boston harbor. The founding
fathers created a superbly flexible, well-balanced political system, but I
wonder whether they would have objected if modern Americans had rioted in the
streets after they elected Al Gore by popular vote only to have Bush be
declared president by the Supreme Court.
We in the United States are now putting our faith in the political
system, hoping it will give us back our freedom next January. Let's hope this
hope is not misplaced and that even those who don't seem to care about freedom
enough to demand it can still go on enjoying it.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
