Good Night and Good Luck

I only rented it because it featured George Clooney, one of my wife’s favorite Hollywood actors. It did not hurt that it was part of the Oscar buzz just a few weeks back, with Clooney a nominee for best director. Otherwise, I had no clue what the story line of this movie was when I picked a copy at Blockbuster Videos Friday evening. We finally got around to watching the movie just before the Sunday midnight deadline for returning it to the store.

It turned out to be a movie about an American political drama of yesteryear. It dealt with one of the darkest days in the history of American civil liberties — the Joseph McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s. It is a story many Americans would rather forget. Yet I found the movie centered on the work of the famed CBS News anchor Edward R. Morrow, a key player in the fight to bring Mr. McCarthy’s witch hunt to an end, to be a compelling and riveting drama.

Perhaps it was because the story of Senator McCarthy reminded me of one man’s capacity to do evil when good people are afraid to speak out even in a country such as the U.S. Perhaps it was the story of Morrow and of CBS news standing up to be counted and saying enough is enough, at great financial and personal risk to themselves. Perhaps it is the uncanny resemblance between the methods Joseph McCarthy deployed in getting away with it all for nearly five years and the system of terror being unleashed half a century later by another man in a country more than seven thousand miles away. There is also the fact that, just like Morrow in the U.S., some of the key players in the fight against the festering tyranny in present day Ethiopia are reporters, albeit not TV superstars like Morrow. Instead, these are men and women who are, for the most part, unknown to anyone other than their immediate families and their coworkers at the rags where they labor.

Nearly every Ethiopian has heard of the names of Hailu Shawul, Berhanu Nega, Merera Gudina, Ledetu Ayalew, Bertukan Medeksa and the other stars and mega stars of the Ethiopian democratic movement. However, most of us would be hard pressed to name three or four members of the Ethiopian free press. Yet, these are the key actors who carried the messages of the movement leaders to the people and brought the heart wrenching and heart warming stories of the hopes, aspirations and frustrations of the often forgotten people of the Ethiopian provinces to Addis and to all the other cities. They made it their mission to let all of us know that we are in this together and that no one was spared from the wrath of Meles.

Joseph McCarthy counted on people being afraid to be involved or just plain uninterested as long as they are not personally impacted by his witch hunt. Regrettably, his assumptions about the reaction of the American people turned out to be right for too long. He used his bully pulpit that was the House Un-American Activities Committee to charge, indict and convict anyone of being a communist and a spy for the USSR by simply saying so. He would routinely concoct stories about ordinary citizens and use the committee hearings as a forum for convicting without evidence those who had been charged. The hearings were often the platform for establishing or reinforcing his credentials so he can comfortably go after his next victim. No, he did not stop at the common man. He routinely manufactured charges against prominent citizens who spoke against him and against the work of his committee. His objective in the high profile cases was to discredit his detractors within their professional circles or worse, within their families. His tactics could and did work only as long as other Americans refused to speak out. As long as people simply went about their business too afraid or too busy to take a stand even as he stripped away their precious civil liberties, then McCarthy’s strategy worked like clockwork.

Meles and before him Mengistu perfected bullying tactics McCarthy would have been proud to call his own. Each of them deployed these tactics and reaped great benefits. To destroy someone, all McCarthy had to do was to label him or her as “a known communist, or a card carrying member of the Civil Liberties Union” or some such nonsense. Mengistu and his henchmen would deem you to be “counter revolutionary, abiyotu yemetaber or an adhari” and tag you as such even if all you did was to ask for the name of the one country or two where Marxism had lifted people out of poverty or let people be free of tyranny. Today, if you spoke disparagingly about Meles and his gang, you would be deemed to be a “chauvinist Amara, an anti-peace element” or worse. It matters not that it was not illegal to be a communist, or a member of the Civil Liberties Union in the 1950s America, just like it is not illegal in Meles’ Ethiopia to be Amara. Just the same, simply to be so labeled sealed the victim’s fate socially and professionally. Fifty years after America exorcised McCarthyism from American political life, people in Ethiopia are sent to prison or shot on sight for engaging in activities that are legal under the laws passed the regime.

America in the 1950s had Morrow and Paley to stand up to the sinister designs of Joseph McCarthy. Ethiopia in the first decade of the twenty first century has its own Morrows and Paleys. Sure, we don’t know their names and faces, but they are there. Some of them are walking the streets of Addis, out of work but thankfully out of prison. You find many others in Meles’ prisons. You find them in exile in just about every country. You find them manning radio broadcasts and cyber journals all over the world, trying to keep the flame of freedom burning. Unlike the America of the 1950s, our reporters come from both sexes. Women stand shoulder to shoulder with the men and discharge their heroic duties. Some of them are even expecting, but they don’t begrudge their circumstances any more than the men. They toil on until they are free to do what they were trained to do.

America’s Morrow and Paley were not trying to change anything. They were trying to protect the liberties Americans had been enjoying for 175 years which had recently come under McCarthy’s attack. Ethiopian scribes have a much bigger burden to bear. They are blazing new frontiers unknown in our history. Their struggle is based on a belief that we too have God given rights to news and information, a right to the truth about our country and about the activities of those who rule over us. They put their lives in harms way so we might know what our compatriots on the other side of the country, the other side of the city or on the other side of the world are experiencing. They earn their badges of honor everyday standing up and irking the deceitful one by reporting on his doings; fully aware but undeterred by his usual retributions.

These are new grounds in our history. If we succeed to hold on to it against the odds, Ethiopian historians will have a new kind of hero and heroine to write about. Until then, I bid my fellow Ethiopians, good night and good luck.