Have you been purged yet?
Or are you one of the smart ones who knows it is wise to shut up and keep your thoughts to yourself?
In William Goldman’s “Marathon Man” (1974/Dustin Hoffman-Lawrence Olivier) there is this refrain, “Is it safe?”
Well, no, it isn’t. It isn’t safe.
Nowhere in America is it safe. Not now. Not anymore. Guess where it is entirely cool? I won’t keep it a secret.
Back then, when the Soviet leaders used to gather up on the balcony to salute the May Day Parade, people used to watch carefully to see who was missing. There was always somebody missing. Someone who had displeased Stalin or whoever ruled at the time. Someone who’d been purged. Sent to Siberia. Or even worse.
Never would it enter your mind that this would be coming to America…land of the free, home of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
But here it is, here we are, and here is a woman in Illinois, a teacher, who did not word it just right and is therefore being “investigated.”
Her superiors pledge to take “appropriate action” against her, and also here another educator.
At Cornell Law School, Prof. William A. Jacobson is being denounced, towards getting him fired, because he has a mind of his own and refuses to play patty-cake.
Do we have gulags yet? Not yet, I don’t think. But Mao-style RE-EDUCATION CAMPS are coming. They are already here. Remember Don Imus.
So far in America, we are merely firing people, and naming people, and shaming people, and cancelling people, to make sure that they never work again.
We will never know the thousands who mute themselves and toe the line because they have families to support.
In Soviet America, there is only one opinion. Mob Culture permits no deviation. There is no tolerance for…ANYTHING. Anything ELSE.
Try it, try some moxie, and see what happens…and we already know what happened at The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, just for starters.
We just don’t know the hundreds...or thousands…of iconoclasts who’ve been purged for disobedience to the Mob…tattle-tale faculty, students, reporters, editors.
We will never know the thousands who mute themselves and toe the line because they have families to support.
Shut up and march to the orders is the best policy. The only policy.
This was rightly covered by Phyllis Chesler here, and observed by me here, much of it elaborately captured in a book that slowly but surely crushes the media for its bias, slanders and deceptions, all for the favors of the Mob, which demands you kiss the feet of Political Correctness. This is that book which exposes it all.
Am I allowed to say this? Is it cool? Is it safe?
Yes…and the secret is this. I write for Arutz Sheva…a light unto journalism. Within the bounds of decency, opinions are varied, and your opinion is valued.
Kudos to the now legendary Opinion Editor, and all the others there, for sifting the gold from such bickering points of view with such aplomb.
You should hear some of the arguments, but all in the name of open debate and free speech.
Free Speech. Remember the Good Old Days? (A month ago.) Well, it is still there, alive and kicking, but mostly in Israel. That is where you have to go.
Soon, for a chance to say your piece, it may be the ONLY place to go.
There, it is still safe.
Here, two voices have been heard crying out from the wilderness, remarkably Bret Stephens at the Times and Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone.
Ordinarily they would go along to get along, but at least these two frontline observers see the writing on the wall, and decipher it as – “The American Press is Destroying Itself.”
You can say that again…but not from here. Only from Israel.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
