Fear And The Word

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My panic persisted even after my comments had been properly recorded and I could hang up. I felt somehow naked, exposed -- as if this sudden experience of fear had really returned me home, as if I could now really connect like lightning with what so many Chileans had been living, day in and day out, during my 10-year absence. This is what it meant to live under the dictatorship, this crawling dread, this certainty (or was it the uncertainty that shook me so deeply?) that at any moment men in ski masks could burst into your life and take you away for the sin of having said out loud what you believed. This is what people risked when they continued to speak out in spite of their fear, most of them unsheltered by The New York Times or CBS or human rights activists from abroad. Most Chilean dissidents were alone with their conscience and their skills and their cunning and their luck. It was, in a way, a true homecoming for me, a way of understanding how repression can shape the shadow of our every word -- a lesson in fear and what it does to us.

A lesson that now, in the long aftermath of the criminal acts of terror perpetrated against the United States in September of 2001, many of us may need to learn all over again.

This story could be misconstrued as suggesting that beyond the countries that suffer dictatorship all is fine and easy for journalists and writers. As we sadly know, this is not the case. In the nations where there is freedom of the press and where you won't be beaten up or imprisoned because of your opinions, there has always been a more insidious pressure put on those who write and investigate to tone down the truth. This pressure is ever more dangerous as democracy finds itself under siege from murderous enemies inside and outside its frontiers.

The newest forms of censorship should be understood against a backdrop of constant corporate muzzling of information and the countless hidden ways in which those in powerful positions (economic, political, religious) exert undue influence on who and what gets published. Fear is not confined to the knock on the door at midnight: There is the fear of losing a job, a promotion, advertising revenue, or access to power; the fear of ridicule; the fear of appearing too militant and crusading; the fear of being denied access, perks, and prizes. How many journalists in what we call the free world write everything they want to, speak the same words in public as they mutter to themselves softly in their own minds? How many bite their tongues, accommodate their views to those with more power? How many buck the trend toward infotainment, dare to disturb and transgress?

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