In a letter to a student, Carla Capponi, an Italian partisan, codename ‘Inglesina’, recipient of the Gold Medal of Military Valour for her involvement in the Italian resistance movement during the second world war, wrote that each epoch presents its own dangers to the democratic way of life.
She encouraged her interlocutor to nurture a sense of purpose and to acknowledge the gratification that comes with each victory, whether having passed an exam or having managed to save oneself from an arrest by the SS. Each achievement, of whatever kind, she went on, means that one has managed to tap into inner resources that might have otherwise remained undiscovered.
Capponi assured her pen pal that the resistance movement was not made up of “monsters of perfection” but they were just men and women who, when faced with the grim situation in their country, made a choice. They did not abandon themselves to tears, they did not hide in fear or, worse, collaborate with the enemy, she went on, but fought and raised their heads above the parapet. Even though they knew that, by going against the Nazi behemoth, they would be in the line of fire, literally.
Elsewhere Capponi had said: “After getting over the initial shock, especially since many of our comrades were being arrested and tortured, all our scruples were replaced by sheer determination to fight for our cause.”
Five years from the global conflict that decimated the world, the US faced another attack on its democratic way of life with McCarthyism, named after the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, who, fearing the infiltration of communism, ‘the Red Scare’, accused private citizens of disloyalty to the nation and embarked on the political practice of publicising accusations of treachery or subversion with insufficient regard to the rule of law in order to suppress opposition.
A vicious witch hunt ensued to smoke out imaginary ‘reds under the beds’. Ordinary people shopped their friends and colleagues to the authorities. They were blacklisted, careers were ruined, livelihoods lost. Lives ended.
President Dwight Eisenhower was urged to take McCarthy down. He told his aides instead: “I will not get into the gutter with this guy.”
But one man did. The journalist from CBS, Edward R. Murrow. “What sets me apart from Senator McCarthy,” Murrow once explained, “is my devotion to the principles upon which this nation rests – justice, freedom and fairness.” He found McCarthy’s demagoguery reprehensible and vowed to take him down.
This is not the time for honest citizens who oppose the government’s undemocratic methods to keep silent- Alessandra Dee Crespo
The two men were on a collision course.
Closing a half-hour television report on March 9, 1954, Murrow delivered a stinging editorial about McCarthy’s undemocratic tactics and their chilling effect: “We will not walk in fear of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and we remember that we are not descended from fearful men (and women) – not from men (and women) who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”
This was the first and deadliest blow. A few months later, Eisenhower quietly exerted pressure on Republican senators to go forward with a censure of McCarthy. On December 2, 1954, the Wisconsin senator was condemned for conduct unbecoming a public servant. And his rampage on the democratic was finally halted.
It only took one journalist and the power of his words.
Our country too, is under siege from its own government. Dissenters are vilified, attacked and censured for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Dissenters are branded as hatemongers, peddlers of hate speech even if rebels use the other side’s own words to describe the sorry state of the nation. In such a climate, friends and allies turn into collaborators because “Everyone has to eat”.
But, as Daphne Caruana Galizia herself once said, “I’d rather be hungry and free than well-fed and oppressed.”
This is not the time for honest citizens who oppose the government’s undemocratic methods to keep silent.
To use Murrow’s own words from the same editorial: “We can deny our heritage and our history but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his (or her) responsibilities.” No matter the hollow reasons one might come up with to justify one’s surrender to the forces of evil.
One lone woman understood this completely. Caruana Galizia justified nothing and paid the ultimate price.
We cannot allow laziness, fear, the conspiracy of silence, secret complicity or indifference to stop us from doing the right thing by our country.
We cannot take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world, we cannot sidestep the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals.
Not my words. These are by St Pope John Paul II who knew a thing or two about living in an oppressive regime and doing something about it.
Dissent from the status quo is not treacherous. In a democracy dissent is an act of faith, said one American statesman. In her letter to the student, when several years had passed since the end of the war, Capponi wrote that the resistance is still an unfinished process because it needs to find an outlet in newer expressions of participation in the democratic life.
History is a mother and a teacher. We’d be fools to neglect her lessons.
Alessandra Dee Crespo is vice president of Repubblika.