Newspaper Article

Informed society, yes; informant society, no

MARK KURLANSKY. Mark Kurlansky is the author, most recently, of "1968: The Year That Rocked the World." This is from the Los Angeles Times

2005

Overview

Rapidly the U.S. government has turned us into the arbitrators of a more general condition known as \"suspiciousness.\" This is problematic. Remember how, just after the attacks, Sikhs in this country were singled out by angry, frightened citizens as suspicious because they wore turbans, as did Afghanistan's Taliban rulers? It is a tragic waste of historical experience that no one today wants to study the fall of communism. Communism was not defeated by the Cold War; it collapsed incrementally from hundreds of bad decisions. And one of those decisions was setting neighbor against neighbor, watching for suspicious activity. They complained of their plight and explained that they had simply been defending their country. They did not see the role they had played in its slow dismantling. One of them asked me, \"If you were told that your country was threatened, wouldn't you give information to your government to help it?\" I thought about this because I felt that they deserved the most honest answer I could give. But it was very difficult to relate my experience in the United States to theirs in East Germany. I thought of the FBI informants who infiltrated the peace movement in the 1960s, and the former communists who had named names to congressional committees a decade earlier. The problem was that every example I could think of was not a true threat. Finally, I had to say, \"No, I wouldn't.\" But today the U.S. government asks for help with what I believe is a real threat. But I still have to say, \"No, I wouldn't.\" A system of informants undermines a society and is inevitably abused by government. Governments too easily become addicted to information. And that is how it always begins.

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