Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 1, 1991 TAG: 9102010749
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But nothing demonstrates more clearly how fragile that tolerance is than the harassment those who support the war in the Persian Gulf have heaped upon those who oppose it.
No less a figure than Clayton Yeutter, the new national chairman-designate of the Republican Party, has promised political revenge against members of the House and Senate who voted against granting President George Bush immediate powers of armed intervention in the Gulf.
Demonstrators against the war throughout the United States have found themselves loudly brayed at and ridiculed and urged to "go back where they came from" for opposing the war.
American citizens of Arab descent, some of whom support and some of whom oppose the war, have found their lives uprooted by threatening telephone calls and threats against their children. Many of them, including a citizen of Buena Vista, have been visited by FBI agents darkly hinting that they may be privy to terrorist cabals and plots.
Instigators of this harassment justify their nastiness with such threadbare cant as "patriotism," "supporting the troops" and "closing ranks in time of war."
They seem hopelessly unable to grasp the fact that many wholly "patriotic" Americans believe, for a variety of reasons, that the war is a mistake; that the best "support" the nation can give servicemen stationed in the Middle East is a prompt return to the United States; that to "close ranks" behind a particular national policy does not oblige one to agree that the policy is wise or desirable.
They seem equally unable to grasp that the underlying strength of any society arrogant enough to call itself "democratic" is its ability to accept, and even encourage, dissent; that blind acceptance of a political orthodoxy is not good citizenship but bad; and that the American Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, in which most Americans take justifiable pride, specifically protects the right of dissent.
We have been this way before, to be sure; in every war of which decent records remain, there is ample evidence that Americans hysterical with war fever have trampled cruelly upon those brave enough to disagree with them.
During the Civil War, Southern cruelty to supposed "Yankee sympathizers" was almost as common as its reverse. Mobs in the North damned and harassed and in some cases murdered those they believed to be "Copperheads," i.e., Confederate sympathizers.
Anti-German feeling ran so high during World War I that German-American families were harassed at work, in schools and in churches. Even faintly Germanic names for common products were hastily anglicized (the "frankfurter" became a "hot dog" and "sauerkraut" became "victory cabbage"); many found their only safety lay in changing their own names.
Few today need reminding that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor thousands of perfectly loyal Japanese-Americans, mostly in California, were rounded up and interned - in concentration camps similar to those we loudly condemned in Germany - by a country whose citizenship the older had chosen and the younger been born into.
But the loudmouth bullies and braggarts go on, sanctimoniously convinced that it is somehow "patriotic" to question the loyalty or courage of those who disapprove of the war and believe it should be ended at once. The very men and women who applaud deadly American air raids on the people of Iraq condemn, in the same breath, Saddam Hussein's missile attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia, and see no hypocrisy.
Like most of those who believe the war unnecessary and mistaken, I shudder at the bigotry it has unleashed. I wonder why so many of my fellow Americans cannot accept disagreement and demand its punishment. Most of all I wonder why our schools have failed so signally to teach the fundamental values of American citizenship to American citizens.
by CNB