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Copyright 2003 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

April 11, 2003, Friday

SECTION: THE CHRONICLE REVIEW; Pg. 9

LENGTH: 1417 words
HEADLINE:

Uncle Sam Over My Shoulder

BYLINE: JUDITH GRANT

BODY:

The passage of the USA Patriot Act -- designed to make it easier forlaw-enforcement officials to track suspected terrorists and sure to increase the government's surveillance of innocent Americans' phone calls, online research, and e-mail messages -- has made me rethink the way I teach my political-science students about resisting authoritarian regimes. At the end of every relevant course I teach, I include a section on totalitarianism. It is a good way to teach students how quickly freedom can be lost, even within the safe confines of a democracy. The case of Germany is especially useful, because the Constitution of the Weimar Republic -- which was the basis of all law in Germany immediately before the Third Reich -- remains one of the most democratic constitutions ever written. After talking about theories of German exceptionalism and, of course, the horrors of the Holocaust, I ask my students to think about how it was possible to move from democracy to dictatorship so quickly, and what the average German could have done differently. What I want them to learn is that resistance is always possible. I concentrate on a few key issues: How do you know when you are losing your freedom in a democracy? How do you know if you are colluding in the demise of freedom and justice? And how can you regain them once they have been lost?

I am always careful to be solicitous of the multiplicity of views in any course, but I find that in the section on resisting authoritarianism, we are all in basic agreement. Hitler is the quintessential bad guy, and students are glad to have the opportunity to think about what they might have done had they been Germans in the Weimar Republic or the Third Reich. That is easier for them than considering examples closer to home, like McCarthyism -- which usually leads to a heated debate about whether the Communist threat really warranted restrictions on civil liberties.

In the case of Nazi Germany, I can tell students stories of heroism, when ordinary Germans harbored Jews in their homes despite their own fears of imprisonment or death. Together, we can bemoan the fact that so few such heroes existed. We talk about how difficult it must have been to resist the Nazis, with their rigid censorship and virtually omnipresent informers, but almost all the students are quick to say that everyone should have done something. It is hard for them to understand that many Germans were sufficiently in sympathy with Nazi anti-Semitism and expansionism that they were willing to give up their civil rights and liberties to support those values.

I suggest to students that the bravery of citizens' acts of conscience and heroism is inversely proportional to how much freedom they enjoy. In America, I say, it is our duty to use our freedoms of speech, press, and assembly -- freedoms that we have in part to encourage our participation in our democracy. Fortunately for us, taking advantage of our freedoms involves very little risk. Marching in a demonstration in the United States does not take as much courage as, say, marching in Tiananmen Square or El Salvador in the 1980s.

We talk about how the simple act of keeping a diary can be heroic. I tell the students how that point was made by George Orwell in 1984. When Orwell's Winston Smith begins his diary, he realizes that although doing so is not illegal, the act is probably punishable by death even if what he writes is politically insignificant. Simply thinking and writing as an individual is a crime. When Winston understands that he is not allowed to think for himself, he sees that his life has become meaningless -- and that realization, ironically, gives him a new purpose: to stay alive.

Since the passage of the USA Patriot Act, I realize that I have been remarkably naive and sanctimonious in my lectures on authoritarian and totalitarian governments. I used to be sure that I would have harbored Jews from Nazi persecution, or given public speeches against death squads in Latin America. But I confess that I am no longer so smug.

I am now experiencing what American legal scholars call "a chilling effect," and I was indeed first aware of it as a sort of chill running up my spine -- a half-second of anxiety, almost subconscious, the moment I heard that the act had been passed. I feel that chill again when I realize that I now pause a moment before I write almost anything. I think about how a government official might read my writing if he or she were trying to build a (completely unjustified) criminal case against me. I worried even while I wrote that last sentence; then I worried about my worry. Might someone in the Justice Department ask: "Why would she be worried if she were doing nothing wrong?"

All that worrying has begun to interfere with my relationships, though so far only in subtle ways. During one recent week, for instance, I happened to hear from some former students who are now scattered around the globe. All contacted me by e-mail, and I answered them in the same way. In my messages, I discussed politics just as we used to do when we were face to face. One former student, a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps who joined the infantry after he graduated last May, wrote me that he was on his way to the Persian Gulf. He wished, he said, that he could be working for peace instead of preparing for war, and he wanted to say goodbye in case ... the obvious happened. I responded that working for peace can be as patriotic as fighting a war. Another wrote from Turkey that while American news sources write about how bad Saddam Hussein is, the Turkish news about the Iraq crisis is all about President Bush's attempt to impose a new world order. Another former student, an Israeli, wrote that although she is no fanatic, it is hard for her not to think of many Arabs as "crazy extremists." She wondered if I understood her feelings. A former South Korean student, now back home, asked if I agreed with him that the mental illness of the person who killed more than 100 people in his country in February is related to the ravages of global capitalism.

I also heard from a colleague on sabbatical in Beirut. She told me that she is safe, and that stories in the news media about the dangers faced by Americans in the Middle East are exaggerated. McDonald's restaurants are the most heavily guarded buildings in Lebanon, she joked.

All those messages led me to wonder about some former students of mine who are now in Saudi Arabia and China, and I thought about writing to them. But I didn't. I felt that chill again.

Is my e-mail monitored, now that I have been in contact with people in countries that border the "axis of evil"? Is one of my correspondents involved in something that could get me in trouble, however innocent I am? Could anyone misconstrue any of my recent political comments, although they are typical of the way I have discussed politics with people all over the world for my whole career? Could I be arrested and held in some undisclosed location without charge, as other Americans have been since September 11? The Associated Press reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is checking the library records of people it suspects of being terrorists -- an activity that the Patriot Act has made legal. What would my record reveal, I wonder?

I am shocked by my fear. My behavior does not reflect the convictions I have espoused for so long. I wonder how many of my colleagues feel a similar chill, and how many think that this fear may be the harbinger of the destruction of some of our most cherished American freedoms.

I hear President Bush tell the nation that the number of protesters against war with Iraq does not matter, that the opinions of American citizens are irrelevant. Yet he presides over a democracy, where the authority of the president comes from the will of the sovereign people. I realize that if I do not stand up and say what I know to be true from years of study -- namely, that in his statement, President Bush appears either not to understand democracy or to reject it -- and say that simple thing out loud, often and to everyone while I still have the freedom to do so, then I can no longer face my students and deliver that lecture about the Weimar Republic.

Judith Grant, an associate professor of political science at the University of Southern California, will become an associate professor of political science and women's studies at Ohio University at Athens in the fall.

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