THE FOLLOWING LETTER APPEARED IN A RECENT EDITION OF THE GAZETTE
To the editor:
Nowadays if you have an unpopular opinion, you will be shunned on social media or possibly lose your job. For the most part, the government lets the twitterverse take care of keeping dissidents in line. Here in Croton, support of Trump will get the Village Board to pass an unconstitutional law and sic Code Enforcement on you but so long as you can afford an attorney they will eventually leave you alone.
It was not always this way: there was a time when American government was less tolerant of dissent. Croton has a long history of support for unpopular left-wing causes. Mt. Airy’s “Red Hill” nickname came from the concentration of political activists in the 1930s. Of three Americans buried in the Kremlin Necropolis, one is a former Croton resident. Many notable radicals have a Croton connection, and were targeted during the days of the Red Scare: for much of the mid-twentieth century, your minority viewpoint made you a target of the federal government.
A recent attempt by the current administration to set up a disinformation board within the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security was blocked, much to the dismay of many of the same people whose left-wing views would have made them targets back in the day.
Taxpayers are not funding an American disinformation board, but we are funding one in the Ukraine. We can all be proud that former Croton high school quarterback John Mearsheimer (Class of 1966) has just made the Ukrainian government blacklist. As with the blacklists of the 1950s, what landed him on the 2022 list was publicly speaking out against American government policy.
After leaving Croton, Mr. Mearsheimer became a professor at the University of Chicago and is today the leading proponent of the “realist” school of international relations. Alumni weekends at any university are normally dull affairs, and Professor Mearsheimer’s 2015 address to the Chicago alumni is not the type of event you might expect to go viral. But his analysis of American policy proved prescient and the YouTube video of his speech has been seen 28 million times. The Ukrainian government is not happy, so they named him a Russian propagandist even though the YouTube video is seven years old.
Whatever we think of the merits of Prof. Mearsheimer’s view, no government should be targeting people for pure speech and no American taxpayers should have to fund a disinformation bureau—whether in the US or a foreign nation. Free speech is not always popular, and it is when speech is under attack that it is most worth defending.
Congratulations Prof. Mearsheimer. You may have left Croton long ago, but in being named to a blacklist because of your views, you are in some good historical company.
--Paul Steinberg, Croton-on-Hudson
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