Self-censorship needed
H. Brandt Ayers’ Oct. 15
column (“Hydra-headed monster”) begins with the opinion,
“If you want to taste fear, then go to Iraq with the
young soldiers and Marines in house to house combat as
reported by journalists who were there with the troops.”
It ends with, “What will we tell the brave young
Marines — teenagers, many of them — choking back their
fears and fighting on, endlessly? If we are honest, we
will tell them the war was wrong. There was a better
way.”
The column pitifully reeks with the author’s “choking
back” his own fears in helpless prostration.
To the author, the young soldiers and Marines of
which he speaks, would wish he ponder this message:
During World War II, columns in the vein of
“Hydra-headed monster” were voluntarily “domestically
censored” as one of the shared sacrifices of war for
discerning American journalists. (See Michael S.
Sweeney’s “Secrets of Victory,” a review at: http://
uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/ sweeney secrets.html).
These journalists understood that such columns (and
defeatist responses to such) aided and abetted the
enemy, emboldened the enemy to fight one more day,
placing an American soldier in enemy cross hairs one
more day.
As John Stuart Mill stated in 1865, “War is an ugly
thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which
thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The
person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight,
nothing which is more important than his own personal
safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of
being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of
better men than himself.”
Armond “Si” Simmons
Pell City
