Is It Really Freedom of Speech? Millions of Americans Cannot Be Heard' (Michael Parenti)

Is It Really Freedom of Speech? Millions of Americans Cannot Be Heard
Author	Michael Parenti
First published	1975-12-16 The Ithaca Journal
Type	Newspaper article
Source	https://www.newspapers.com/image/255241735/

Is It Really Freedom of Speech? Millions of Americans Cannot Be Heard is an article by Statesian political scientist Michael Parenti, published in The Ithaca Journal on 16 December 1975.

Earlier on 9 December 1975, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, the former fascist dictator of South Vietnam, had been invited to Cornell University by student fraternity leaders, being paid $1,500 to speak in the Bailey Hall auditorium. However, just half an hour into the address, he was shouted off stage by the audience, who had previously been agitated by Ron Bunch's Committee for an Anti-War Reunion (CAWR). After Kỳ left, visiting professor of government Michael Parenti and assistant professor of philosophy Richard W. Miller went on stage and made a series of remarks denouncing Kỳ.

The incident became a major controversy, with The New York Times reporting on it and conservative political commentator William F. Buckley Jr. writing a column about it. Parenti stopped visiting Cornell soon after the incident and Miller was charged with violating the Campus Code of Conduct, but was later found innocent.

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When Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, former dictator of South Vietnam, appeared at Cornell last week, the audience greeted him with open hostility. To them Kỳ was not merely another guest lecturer: he was the man who had never allowed freedom of speech in his own country. He personally had flown planes carrying napalm and anti-personnel bombs against civilian targets in Vietnam. Kỳ's military police resorted to tiger cages, mass arrests, torture, and systematic assassination of students, intellectuals, workers, veterans, women, professionals, and Buddhist monks. Kỳ and his cohorts pocketed American funds, engaged in land grabs against poor peasants, and ran one of the largest heroin operations in the world.

The country that Kỳ defended was the Vietnam of the big landlords, sweatshop owners, black marketeers, pimps, slave labourers, embezzlers, narcotic pushers, military chieftains, and price-gouging merchants. It was also the Vietnam of Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard Oil, Dow, ITT, IBM, GE, GM, and a hundred other American corporations that had investments in Vietnam and were making fat profits off the war.

But whatever his venality and corruption, Kỳ's most unforgivable sin was the instrumental role he played in the prosecution of an imperialist genocidal war against his own people, a war that violated every civilised code of human conduct.

This was the problem the Cornell audience was having: Unlike some of their more sanguine associates, they could neither forget nor forgive the war that cost 55,000 American lives, another 30,000 Americans permanently and totally disabled, 200,000 others wounded, some two million Vietnamese dead, disabled, or wounded, and six million homeless. The wildlife of Vietnam was nearly totally destroyed by the saturation bombing; vast amounts of acreage were turned into permanent moonscape; water supplies and ecological systems were poisoned by tons of chemical defoliants causing astronomical increases in birth deformities and intestinal cancer. This was the Vietnam that the Johnson-Nixon, Thiệu-Kỳ cliques created, a valley of tears and blood where men were turned into torturers and killers, women into widows and prostitutes, and little children into crippled beggars and pathetic orphans.

For the Cornell audience, then, the question was not "Should Kỳ the murderer and war criminal enjoy freedom of speech?" Rather it was: "Should Kỳ the murderer and war criminal enjoy freedom?" The reason people did not want Kỳ in Bailey Hall was because they wanted him in jail—where he belongs.

But he hasn't been charged with any crime, some would argue; there has been no indictment, no trial. That is exactly the problem. Why hasn't there been? A precedent was set at Nuremberg. German and Japanese war criminals were hanged for their atrocities. But Kỳ roams the U.S. lecture circuit as a celebrity, at fees ranging from $1,500 to $2,500.

About 12 million of the poorest Americans have to live a whole year on what Kỳ rips off in a night.

Why, in Kỳ's case, are we asked to respect standard procedures of justice when in fact these procedures are not being applied? We know that Kỳ will not be brought to justice because those who have the power to do so, share in his guilt. The other war criminals sit in the White House and State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, or they're now heading up the corporations, foundations, and big research institutes, or they're just sunning themselves in San Clemente.

Hence, many of the protestors at Bailey Hall felt that "freedom of speech" was being used as a cover-up for an event that in effect legitimated the war and the war criminals. In the last issue of Ramparts Noam Chomsky describes how the history of the Vietnam war is being re-written and made legitimate. Now we are being told by the mainstream press that our intervention was well-intentioned, morally right but a "mistake" insofar as we "miscalculated" by "overextending ourselves."

The issues of moral responsibility, global interventionism, and U.S. imperialism are neatly evaded so that U.S. decision-makers might be free to venture into other Vietnams in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to make the world safe for Gulf and ITT.

Kỳ's views are part of the campaign to rewrite Vietnam history, to justify the past in order to prepare us for the future. Kỳ will be doing interviews for Playboy and for television and radio; he'll be writing his memoirs and in other ways raking in the money and getting national exposure for his story — which also happens to be the Establishment's story. Those who show such concern for his freedom ought also to be more mindful of the millions of ordinary Americans who cannot be heard or who, if heard, are summarily ignored. What about their right to talk back, to voice their grievances and more importantly to challenge the powers that be and have their interests respected and protected?

The truth is, there is no equal opportunity for free speech in this country. Freedom cannot be divided from power and wealth. If you've got the big money, then you can buy the big influence and the big exposure for your views. Since power and wealth are so unequally divided so is free speech and so is freedom in general. No one is more free than Nelson and David Rockefeller who, among a handful of men, place a limit on the shape of our society, the content of our media, the textbooks in our schools, the art in our museums, the forms of recreation and kinds of jobs we have, the quality of the air we breathe and the food we eat, the very pictures in our heads.

What many people have come to realise is that the "dialogues" and little debates between powerless people which are palmed off as freedom of speech represent little of that. Nor should such speech be equated with democracy. Like any other system of government, democracy is not a seminar but a system of power.

It is a method of holding a government accountable for its actions so that it will answer to the needs of its people rather than to the special interests of corporate and military elites. We don't have a democracy when we're free to say what we want while those at the top are free to do what they want to us because they have the power. With that power they control and land, labour, natural resources, and mass-circulated ideas of this society.

We are engaged in a political struggle about which direction this country takes. Will it be (1) toward politico-economic democracy, real democracy, which comes only when ordinary people participate directly in decisions regarding the production and use of natural and social resources and share more or less equally in the benefits; or (2) as it now remains, a country run by Wall Street, the Rockefellers, the Pentagon, and the CIA? Small groups of rich and powerful men who tell us what we must think, how we must obey, how much harder we must work, how much more we must pay, and how quiet we should be as they parade their lie-mongering trigger-men before us.